You’ve seen them before…probably more often than you’d like.
Some members of the Financial Crimes Unit pictured with a pile of paperwork from recent investigations. From left, Detective Constable Adrian Neblett, Detective Sergeant Orville Williams, Detective Constable Murray Spelay, and (sitting) Detective Sergeant Michael Montague. Photo: Brent Fuller |
‘CONGRATULATIONS, YOU’RE A WINNER OF THE $73 MILLION LOTTO!’ states an e-mail, promising riches beyond your wildest dreams if you simply reply or call a phone number.
These scams have become so frequent in the Cayman Islands that the people charged with policing them can receive reports of up to 100 similar e-mails a day.
Detective Sergeant Michael Montague said the Financial Crimes Unit keeps records on each different type of scam, but he said the unit simply doesn’t have the resources to investigate them all.
‘Our advice to people is to simply not respond (to the e-mails),’ Sergeant Montague said.
In some instances, Mr. Montague said, scammers are just looking for personal information such as bank account numbers to commit identity theft. But in other, more unusual cases they may actually be looking for a partner in crime.
Financial crimes has investigated at least two cases within the past year involving scams where fraudulent travellers’ cheques were sent to people in Cayman who cashed the cheques for the scammers, sent them most of the money and kept a little for themselves. By the time the banks realised the cheques were fake, the money had been sent.
Mr. Montague said people who get involved in this kind of scam generally established contact with the perpetrators via e-mail, and kept communicating with them over time.
He said people are often picked to participate in this scam because they were identified through their use of job search websites. In some cases, they may have thought they were participating in a legitimate business.
Detective Sergeant Orville Williams who’s also with the Financial Crimes Unit said this can make identifying the victim and the suspect in such cases somewhat difficult.
‘It is relative to the person’s financial state,’ Sergeant Williams said. ‘They usually target people who are in need, destitute people, who need jobs and need money.’
According to Cayman Islands law the person who cashed the fraudulent cheque is responsible for paying back the amount to the bank. Some fraudulent cheques used in previous scams have totalled 10s of thousands of dollars.
Catching those behind the scams is a daunting task.
‘These guys have agents all over the world,’ Mr. Montague said. ‘They use a phone-switching service so if you call a number in the states, it switches to Antigua, from Antigua to the UK, from the UK to Nigeria. The mailing system is somewhat similar.’
The internet has also changed the game for scammers, making it quicker and cheaper for them to contact would-be victims.
‘They wouldn’t be able to find those people through the regular postal service,’ Mr. Williams said. ‘Letters cost them for stamps and envelopes so they just use the internet.’
Detectives said the sheer amount of scam e-mails now appearing in the Cayman Islands make it more likely that some people will fall for it, especially those who haven’t been exposed to them.
Sergeant Montague said it is rare for cases where someone is contacted through an unsolicited e-mail to balloon into full-fledged fraudulent cheque scams, but he said it does happen. He said the easiest thing to do is just ignore e-mails which seem too good to be true.
The Financial Crimes Unit also asks that anyone who receives cheques they believe to be fraudulent to contact the unit at 949-8797.
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