Canadian
Press
Canadians
Keep Falling for Nigerian Letter Scams
July
3 , 2009 --Toronto -- Fraud artists are finding it
easier amid a battered economy to entrap marks with dubious
offers once easily dismissed as scams, and are snaring a growing
number of victims to the tune of millions of dollars a month,
experts say.
The Competition Bureau
is warning that recessions are "boom times for scammers" and
predicts desperate Canadians will fall into traps offering
easy cash online, by phone and mail.
Statistics provided
by PhoneBusters - The Canadian Anti-Fraud Call Centre run
by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Competition Bureau
and Ontario Provincial Police - show Canadians are increasingly
falling prey to scams of all types.
"Fraud does tend to
increase in economic downturns," said Ian Nielsen-Jones, the
Competition Bureau's assistant deputy commissioner.
Vulnerable people sometimes
lower their defences and make bad decisions as times get tough,
while others on the borderline of lawful society turn to crime,
Nielsen-Jones said.
Scams involving promises
of employment are on the rise, while other ploys that had
virtually disappeared because the public had gotten wise to
the ruse are now making a comeback, he added.
"We used to say that
lottery scams had pretty much gone away," Nielsen-Jones said.
"Well they've come
back again and I think they've come back again because of
the economic downturn."
Even the most outlandish
scams continue to be successful. Among those is the so-called
Nigerian letter scam, which typically offers too-good-to-be
true promises of untold millions from an African country in
exchange for some simple help with a few bank transactions.
The offer - which is
usually passed along in broken English and riddled with grammatical
errors - sees most Internet users simply hit delete. Still,
an average of 10 Canadians each month continue to fall for
it and get soaked for as much as hundreds of thousands of
dollars.
June was a relatively
slow month for victims of the letter scam in Canada, with
four people reporting losses of a total of almost $73,000.
But in May, 11 Canadians
fell for the letter scam and were taken for a total of almost
$571,000, while a U.S. victim reported they lost $200,000
in a scam with Canadian links.
"Is it greed? I don't
think so. Is it pure ignorance? Maybe. Is it possible that
the Canadian citizens are not well informed?" said Cpl. Louis
Robertson, a spokesman for PhoneBusters.
"Why does it work?
I don't know. I've been with the RCMP for 21 years and I'm
still looking at the same email messages - and they still
work."
But the millions lost
in letter scams are just a drop in the bucket compared to
losses from identify theft and mass-marketing fraud, which
covers a vast array of online and telephone scams. That includes
bogus offers about investment opportunities, prizes and lottery
winnings, and inheritance claims.
More than 1,000 Canadians
contact PhoneBusters every month after being victimized by
identify theft and through June 30 of this year, almost 6,700
complained they'd lost about $5.2 million.
Last year, more than
11,000 victims reported more than $9.6 million in losses.
In 2008, about 57 per
cent of the 14,201 victims of mass-marketing scams with Canadian
connections were from other countries, while the percentage
was about 67 per cent in 2007.
In the first six months
of the year, PhoneBusters has heard from more than 7,000 mass-marketing
fraud victims, including 3,903 Canadians, with losses totalling
almost $26.5 million.
And Nielsen-Jones said
those numbers only scratch the surface, since authorities
usually only hear from victims who have lost a lot of money.
Many who get taken for $100 or less don't bother reporting
they've been scammed.
"I'd be willing to
say you could take those numbers and multiply them by 10 in
terms of the actual attempted victimizations," he said.
"The truth is we believe
that somewhere between five and 10 per cent of people who
have been victimized, or almost victimized, phone into law
enforcement."
Usually authorities
only track and investigate scams that involve larger losses
but the Competition Bureau is currently looking into a phoney
employment opportunity scam that may have defrauded around
10,000 people out of around $50.
"I don't mean to demean
(small) losses but we have bigger fish to fry. But when there's
that many victims, it's time for law enforcement to step in,"
Nielsen-Jones said.
For victims who call
PhoneBusters hoping they might get their money back, the answer
isn't reassuring.
"First of all, are
we going to actually find the perpetrator, are we going to
actually bring the perpetuator to justice, and is the court
going to order restitution?" Nielsen-Jones said.
"We do the best we
can but we don't promise that we're able to (recover money)
as a sort of a normal course of events."
The most successful
scams by money lost, by province in 2008, according to PhoneBusters:
Alberta - Investments,
identity theft, employment
British Columbia -
Investments, identity theft, Nigerian letters
Manitoba - Identity
theft, merchandise, chat lines
New Brunswick - Merchandise, sale
of merchandise by complainant, identity theft
Newfoundland and Labrador
- Identity theft, merchandise, sale of merchandise by complainant
Northwest Territories
- Loan, employment, emergencies
Nova Scotia - Identity
theft, merchandise, sale of merchandise by complainant
Ontario - Identity
theft, investments, merchandise
Prince Edward Island
- Bridal, inheritance, gems/precious metals
Quebec - Identity theft,
investments, Nigerian letters
Saskatchewan - Merchandise,
relationships, identity theft
Yukon - Prizes, identity
theft, chat lines
Copyright © 2009
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
By Michael Oliveira
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