| By :
Molly Wider
If you are one of the thousands of people who receive e-mails that claim you have won money or have someone claiming to pay you for your help to transfer money you need to read this. Every year, these mass marketing scams are costing Canadians more than $10 billion and this number has been growing steadily since 2007. Many of the offers that come streaming through your e-mail box will appear very legitimate, which is the key to getting unsuspecting people to open them. They are sophisticated schemes that offer things such as lotteries where they require money upfront in order to complete the transaction to send you the winnings. There are also many fake bank schemes asking for your personal information to update their system or other money schemes that single out people with bad credit then attempt to offer them loans (that never arrive) for an up-front fee. There are also schemes that offer prizes from contests, but to claim any such prize, you must call a special 1-900 number, which ends up costing the consumer much more than the value of their winnings. There is also the Nigerian millionaire who needs your help getting money out of the African nation and offers a huge payment in lieu of your help. The more recent of bad Canadian schemes is discounted auto insurance being offered in Ontario. People are sent fake insurance slips and convinced they are insured when actually, they are not. The RCMP says that most fraud in Canada is not reported. In 2009 alone, The Canada Anti-Fraud Centre received more than 25,000 consumer complaints about these schemes. That averages more than 430 calls a day, but that is anticipated to be a mere fraction of the real number as the RCMP believe between one and fiver per cent of Canadian victims actually come forward. The reason, they believe, is because fraud victims do not want to admit they've been had. The stereotype that fraud victims are stupid prevents many from reporting but it's important to note that fraud victims include experienced business people, doctors, police officers and lawyers. It includes anyone and everyone. Canada is officially a member of the International Mass-marketing Fraud Working Group that involves police agencies from the U.K., the Netherlands, Nigeria, Australia and the United States. Since 2008, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre has discovered and shut down more than 45,000 scammer e-mail accounts along with over 10,000 phone numbers. It has also been responsible for working with credit card companies in closing 150 merchant accounts that were posing threats to consumers by scammers. These organized crimes are operating from one country but stealing from people all over the world. This has made it incredibly difficult to prosecute any of the scammers so the best that can be done now is to break the link between the scammers and their victims. A good rule-of-thumb to go by is to use common sense. If you have not entered a contest or a lottery or have shared with email address with someone you know, any outside contact is probably a scam.
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