Fraud Awareness

Fraudsters will pose as relatives or friends, claiming that they have an emergency and require for funds to be sent urgently. Common scenarios used: to pay for hospital treatment or to leave a foreign country. The scammer will gather information on the victim from social networking sites or may hack the email of the victim and obtain information on contacts or hack the email of a relative. They may also involve other crooks that claim to be police officers or lawyers.

A scammer will claim to be a government official when contacting the victim and have access to private information on the individual which he will use to convince the victim that the request is genuine. The scammer will then demand payment for resolving any immigration issues that the victim may declare. The victim me be threatened with legal action or deportation if he does not comply. Immigration officers do not collect money or payments by phone or through money transfer service providers.

The victim purchases an item on the internet but the item is not received after payment is made. The items being sold could be well below their market value & may appear to be genuine with the fraudster using various methods to make the item being sold appear genuine.

Fraudster will send a cheque for an amount more than what the victim expects to receive for a product or service. The fraudster will request to bank the cheque and send back the excess amount through a money transfer service provider. The cheque will bounce and the victim will be left out of pocket.  As described earlier, the victim may also be sent a cheque to cover the expenses for accepting an employment, purchases etc. & will be left out of pocket when the cheque bounces.

This refers to the marketing of goods and services by telephone, usually unsolicited to potential customers. This covers a number of different fraud types where consumers are contacted by phone e.g.  charity fraud, lottery scam, internet purchases, immigration scam & advance fee scam.

Identity theft is the crime of obtaining the personal or financial information of another person to use their identity to commit fraud, such as making unauthorized transactions or purchases. Identity theft is committed in many different ways and its victims are typically left with damage to their credit, finances, and reputation.

‘Cash flipping’ is used by criminals who lure vulnerable victims into parting with a small amount of money – and their bank details – with the promise they will receive a larger sum in return for their services. Their account is then used to move money in and out to launder funds.

Extortion phishing Scams are used to obtain personal information from a victim. The emails sent usually contain some personal information already e.g. date of birth and the message will say that they have more personal information which they will expose online unless they are paid. Although they seem very targeted, most extortion scams cast a wide net. Cyber criminals collect lists of passwords or other info through data breaches or by buying them on the dark web. They will then send an email to everyone on their list to see if someone will take the bait and respond. Often, they will ask for payment in Bitcoin or another form of cryptocurrency, which is harder to trace. One of the most common types of extortion is sextortion where the cyber-criminal has obtained private images, messages or videos and uses this to extort the victim.