February
27, 2020
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Top Stories
Next week is National Consumer
Protection Week in the US
Nigerian TV: Extensive story on how Yahoo Boys operate;
explains how they train one another; how they operate dating scams and fake
checks scams; how they launder money; interviews with crooks
AARP releases new survey on imposter scams
- Gov’t imposters, grandparent scams, romance scams, census
- 47% have encountered one
- 18% who lost money have had health or emotional distress problems; more of these by people under 50
- 70% of the public is not familiar with census scams
BBC: Interview with the volunteer who has helped
thousands of romance fraud victims in Finland
Agari releases in depth study of BEC group Exaggerated
Lion
- Spread over Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana
- Has BEC victims send physical checks instead of wire transfers
- Uses romance fraud victims as mules to launder money
Canada’s Competition Bureau settles with ticket reseller StubHub over mandatory additional fees not disclosed until end of the process: collects $1.3 million fine
FBI says crooks took in $144 million from ransomware scams over the last seven years; most in bitcoin; this does not include recovery costs
Question of the Week: Why is debt collection fraud way down? FTC complaints fell from 626,000 in 2017 to 135,000 in 2019. The FTC has brought several cases against frauds collecting from people that really did not owe the debt – or at least not to the scammers. Has that had a huge effect here? Or has something else happened that the Fraud Report has missed? Curious minds want to know.
Full Report here
