TheBuzz
TheBuzz
Some costly lessons
are avoidableScams are as old as the human race. From the moment the serpent convinced Eve that taking one bite would be a good thing and Adam failed to intervene, folks have been duped.
Scams and schemes morph with each new bit of technology that comes down the pike and these days spread with lightning rapidity thanks to ether-borne e-mail.
One such scam is coursing through University of Hawaii e-mail servers and comes from a "Gill Morgan," identifying himself as "auditor general of Development Bank for Southern Africa." The e-mail expresses an urgent need to transfer $26 million out of the bank into a cooperative person's account; a favor worth 35 percent of the total amount to be paid to the lucky account holder. The scam victim-to-be replies with account number and other information and waits to hit the better-than-Vegas jackpot.
It's a new variation on a very old ploy known to law enforcement agencies as the "Nigerian Letter Scam." While not the most common form of Internet fraud, it exacts the highest losses from its victims, according to the federal Internet Fraud Complaint Center.
Scammers "find out how much is in the (victim's) account, say $3,500, and they'll take $3,400," said John Gillies, supervisory special agent for the FBI White Collar Crime program.
Where the Nigerian scam has netted American victims, "Nigerian authorities are not sympathetic toward U.S. citizen- victims because it is a violation of their statute," Gillies said, to take money out of the country.
There's a bit more sympathy at the U.S. government level.
The IFCC was formed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center to address fraud committed over the Internet. It does so by funneling information between victims of fraud and the federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that investigate and prosecute the cases.
The FBI won't prosecute a case if someone has lost $800, Gillies said, but losses suffered by several people in several jurisdictions may add up to meet a standard for prosecution by one or more of the many agencies involved with IFCC.
Of the more than 11,000 fraud complaints referred by the IFCC from May 2000 to May 2001, auction fraud was the most widely reported, at 52.4 percent of all complaints, followed by nondelivery of merchandise and payment at 26.3 percent; credit or debit card fraud at 7.4 percent; confidence fraud at 5.5 percent. The so-called Nigerian letter scam was fifth at 2.5 percent.
The latter caused the highest dollar loss for its victims, at a median of $3,000.
"People used to get this via mail, then fax, now e-mail," Gillies said. He recommends deleting the messages or forwarding them to the Honolulu FBI office at honolulu@ us.fbi.gov or the IFCC via its Web site at www.ifccfbi.gov.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com