California county intends to prosecute scammers

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Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 5:20 pm

I have a relative living in a retirement community in California.
This article is from the community newsletter.
I have removed the names and addresses.
A "supervisor" is a county elected official.

Quote:

Supervisor (name) asks residents to send scam letters to her office

District 2 Supervisor (name) was guest speaker at the
Community Club's first Special Event on April 30. She primarily
discussed (county) County's money problems and proposed solutions.

She gave special emphasis to the issue of "elder abuse", the
attempt by scammers to defraud retired people of their savings.

Recent mailings from unknown companies urging residents to renew
their auto insurance or home insurance; requests for resident
social security numbers; and announcements of lottery winnings
from London, Nigeria, and other countries; are examples of attempts to defraud.

(name) would like residents to periodically send her copies
of e-mails and post office mailings that are suspicious.
Send them to (name), (address).
The e-mail address is (email).

The county intends to find and prosecute the scam artists.

Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 6:17 pm

It's a wonderful idea,and I wish them luck.So much of it is from overseas though,that I question what they will really be able to acomplish.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 3:10 am

I have lived in California since 1954, when we were dragged here kicking and screaming from Oregon.

Believe this: absolutely nothing is going to improve....except possibly that particular supervisor's hand-over-hand climb up the political ladder.

In addition, this state's current attorney general is spectacularly ineffectual. Previously, he was an ineffectual governor, then ineffectual mayor of Oakland. Under his leadership, Oakland CA (way up there in crime statistics) had a police department that had no fingerprint lab. None. There is no program called CSI Oakland on TV.

We have also had spectacularly ineffectual Republican governors; it's not about which dopey political party is going to swindle us next.

419Eaters is doing more good work than the entire United States government in this area.

The US Federal Trade Commission has been castrated long since.

Anybody looking to (any) government to protect them from these laughable scam letters is in BIG trouble.

This is not merely cynicism; I know just a little about these things:
BS Electronic Engineering (so-so idea)
MA Public Administration (bad idea)
JD Law (worse idea)

Other than educational efforts, even a gung-ho government couldn't do anything. Do we want them monitoring and censoring the Internet? You wouldn't like the result. As Doc Holiday so correctly points out, most of it does not originate within the borders of this country (USA) or your country. If it did, the packets would still come through other countries.

I have a 90-year-old mama-in-law. She is the sweetest old bat on earth, but educational efforts would be wasted. It has taken decades before she finally stopped giving money to fake charities. Old folks who lived through the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s are simply too trusting. They aren't stupid; they just cannot conceive of how vile these scammers are until it happens to them.

Imagine how fast your DSL connection would be if all the penis spam and mugu scams disappeared from the Internet tomorrow.

Wow.

Posted: Fri May 16, 2008 1:42 pm

^^ Well, we could just bomb Nigeria. That seems to be our typical modality for nations that piss us off Wink

[It's called sarcasm... I know not all lads are from Nigeria]

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 4:14 am

A word of warning; Keep this out of the political arena or it will be locked. Warnings would be distributed as this would be the first warning.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 7:10 am

It would really be nice if states started cracking down on scammers fleecing elderly people. They should be punished severely.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 5:20 pm

The problem, obviously, is that the scammers are outside of the state's jurisdiction. Who are they going to prosecute? As we already know, tracing lads and linking them to a real name is mostly impossible. And until an actual crime is committed, like money changing hands, they are not guilty. The victim usually will not report it and look foolish after that. Who is going to pay for the cost of international investigations?

The FBI actually already has a web site where you can send this type of information. They are collecting the same information this community is going to collect, and you see how far the FBI has gotten with this.

Basically what this is, is a few (or one) community member were scammed and they complained to the community board who said they are going to do something about it with no idea what is happening.

Creating a group that goes out to retirement homes and city councils and teaches the elderly about scams and how to protect themselves would be much more efficient and cost effective.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 5:39 pm

DrWho wrote:

The problem, obviously, is that the scammers are outside of the state's jurisdiction. Who are they going to prosecute?

I was referring to scammers that are in the state's jurisdiction. There are many types of scammers that fleece the over 50 population.

One that comes to mind is a rental scam. This actually happened in the 80's before scamming became so high tech. A "rental finder" company opened in my city, and advertised its services heavily to "mature people that don't have time to do their own leg work to find a rental home that suits their needs." Let us do the work for you was their motto, and it attracted many people over the age of 50 who were busy and wanted to find a place to rent, but didn't have the time to put into it.

This company charged a rental finder's fee of $100 per customer. In addition to local residents on the move, there was an influx of retirees moving here from CA that used the service. After the scam was discovered, it was found that the scammers had made around $50,000. They left town in the middle of the night but were later located in the USA and prosecuted by the state in which the crime took place. The way this company located rentals for people was to use the rental ads in the local daily newspaper. The victims could have done that themselves at the cost of $0.25.

Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 6:58 pm

DrWho wrote:

Creating a group that goes out to retirement homes and city councils and teaches the elderly about scams and how to protect themselves would be much more efficient and cost effective.

This is an excellent suggestion, especially for scams like 419, where the scammers are well beyond the jurisdiction of local or even federal LEA. Many of the elderly that fall for these scams are not unintelligent or senile, they are simply new to the internet and too naive for their own good. Educating potential victims is, IMO, one of the best ways to keep the scammers from getting a payday.

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