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on 11-09-2007 19:41
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Published in : The News, Latest News |
Financial victims turn up every day
Everyone knows the saying: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
But not enough people follow it, authorities say.
The adage is a mantra of law enforcement officials investigating scams that fleece people every day.
Online lottery scams out of Canada and Eastern Europe, purchasing scams, phony loan companies — the Worcester Police Department’s financial crimes unit has seen residents fall victim to all of them.
Even a couple of Worcester police officers have been scammed.
Investigators have recently seen an increase in a utility scam in which electric or gas company accounts are opened without the knowledge of the victim.
“At one time a woman had nine accounts open in her name at different locations in the city with one utility company,” said Sgt. Gary J. Quitadamo, a detective with the financial crimes unit. The woman didn’t know about them until the company sought to collect money for the delinquent accounts.
An individual pays for a victim’s information and then uses it to open an account in the victim’s name, the sergeant said. “Then the accounts become delinquent and the victim receives either a notice of collection or sees it on their credit report,” he said. “That’s when we are called.”
Police are working with the companies on the utility scam, but the sergeant declined to name the companies.
Sgt. Quitadamo and Detective Thomas P. Looney Sr., members of the unit, which includes four other detectives, receive at least a dozen calls a day from people reporting they were swindled in some way. Detective Looney has seen people lose thousands of dollars in scams.
“Marriages have been destroyed and lives are crushed,” he said. “People have lost homes; their credit has been destroyed.”
Many people believe they have received their big break when they get a notice saying they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a foreign lottery. If they follow the letter’s request and send cash to receive the winnings, they don’t receive money but instead land on a list.
“Once they respond to them, they are placed on a ‘suckers list.’ And those are exchanged by those scam artists, who are normally overseas,” Detective Looney said. “They want so bad for it to be true. Even when we tell them it is a scam, they still don’t believe it.”
A city police officer was conned in a type of purchasing scam that occurs after someone posts an item for sale on a Web site such as www.craigslist.com.
The officer, who was not identified, posted a car for sale and was contacted by a man who said he wanted to purchase it. The man promised to send a check and a car carrier to pick it up because the car was going to be shipped overseas, Sgt. Quitadamo said. The man said the car carrier needed to be paid in cash so he was going to send the officer a check for more than the asking price, with the extra going to the driver.
The officer cashed the check, but was then told the extra money should be sent back to the man. The officer did so. No car carrier ever came. The car was never sold and the check was phony, leaving the officer responsible for the bank loss.
“If you are being paid more than the sale price, it is a scam,” Detective Looney said.
The phony checks and cashiers checks are extremely well made, according to investigators, and are usually not flagged as fakes until they hit the clearinghouses.
Scams are frequently discussed at the Massachusetts Financial Crimes Task Force meetings, the investigators said.
Another city police officer was almost trapped in an Internet scam when the officer tried to receive information out of the state Registry of Motor Vehicles. The Web site that the officer used was not the official state site, however, and another officer noticed the suspicious Web address before any damage was done.
The state RMV released a warning about such phony Web sites earlier this year.
Locally, Detective Looney is investigating a number of contractor scams. A contractor is paid money to do work on someone’s home but never shows up, he said.
In another local scam, a violent city gang is using bad checks to finance their activities, police said.
Letter and e-mail scams continue by the millions. Investigators call it “phishing,” with senders hoping to catch someone unaware in the scam net.
A bank cannot send unsolicited e-mail, police said, and people in the United States are not allowed to participate in foreign lotteries. Therefore, e-mails of that nature should be red flags to people. But there are also other scams, police said.
“They always want money,” Detective Looney said of letter and lottery scams. “You should know if you have to send money to win money, then it’s not real.”
A retired school teacher lost $30,000 in a Canadian lottery scam before his relatives stepped in, the detective noted. The people in that scam even called the man on the phone.
What authorities find is that many of these scams come from Africa, Europe or Canada, making it difficult to prosecute the perpetrators.
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By Scott J. Croteau ,September 4, 2007
Last update : 14-10-2007 12:00
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