Experts are warning that today's poor job market has become a booming market for scam artists who are cashing in on the desperation of unemployed and financially strapped consumers.
AOL's Daily Finance is reporting that consumer fraud is not a new phenomenon, but the last few years of economic distress have created a boon for con-artists who have developed clever new schemes to bilk the public out of their money. From work-at-home schemes to phony mortgage loan modifications, more and more Americans are finding themselves victims of these crimes.
"There are a suite of scams that concentrate on people that suffer financially and we've really been going after those," Steven Baker, director of the Midwest region of the Federal Trade Commission, told AOL. "Certainly it's an increasing problem of people taking advantage of that suffering. It's really bad because you're holding on by your fingernails in the first place and then they steal what little money you have left."
The Consumer Sentinel Network, a database made available only to law enforcement officials, has tracked 6.1 million consumer complaints in the last five years. In 2010 alone, consumer complaints totaled over $1.7 billion.
And that's only what gets reported, AOL reports. During a random telephone survey conducted a few years ago, Baker discovered that only 8.2 percent of victims reported complaints. "In other words, 90% don't. And we know that from our own cases that we only have a couple of hundred complaints and it turns out there are thousands [of victims]. If I didn't do this for a living, I'd never believe how much fraud is out there."
A good example of the kind of schemes that are being foisted upon the public these days is the case of Teresa Yeast, 45, of Platea, Pennsylvania who responded to an ad in her local paper to work at home creating angel pins made out of beads and ribbons. Because her husband had just been laid off and the couple had two disabled children, she thought it would be a good way to make some extra money at home.
She checked out the Darling Angel Pins website and found it be very professional looking with advertisements about how they donated to the American Cancer society and other wonderful causes.
"I thought it would be really great to get involved," she told AOL. "They told me they would pay me $2.50 for every pin I assembled for them, that I could make as many as I wanted, that they would sell them."
All she had to do was mail the company a $500 deposit for the supplies. She'd then make a sample pin, submit it to the company for review and, once approved, begin production. Yeast mailed her $500, received a box of supplies, and quickly assembled an angel to be reviewed by the company for quality purposes.
This is when it all started to go downhill.
The company rejected her angel. She made a few changes, sent it back, and had it returned once more.
"It went back and forth, back and forth," she said. "I thought to myself that there is no way this pin is not of good quality."
When she called to discuss the problem, her calls were initially refused. When she finally did get through to someone, they said they never received her sample pin.
At that point, Yeast demanded her $500 deposit back, which the company always said was an option. When they refused to refund her money, she called an attorney who discovered that Darling Angel Pins was a multimillion-dollar fraud. The company never accepted anyone's pins and simply waited for the consumer to give up and walk away, leaving their deposit behind.
Yeast was furious and sent letters to everyone she could think of. The FTC took an interest in her story and launched an investigation which resulted in closing down and seizing the assets of Darling Angel Pins along with a dozen other similarly fraudulent companies.
While there hasn't been any dramatic increase in the number of reported scams in recent years, con-artists are definitely tailoring their schemes to fit the current situation.
"Scams follow the headlines, so the people who do these scams, if they see that a lot of people are unemployed or are at risk of foreclosure, they will go after them, will design something to go after those people," explains Peter Kaplan, deputy director of public affairs at the FTC.
For instance, some of today's most popular schemes involve mortgage loan modification for homeowners facing foreclosure, and a variety of so-called business opportunities such as offering to help a consumer set up a medical billing practice in exchange for an upfront fee, or luring people into selling phony products.
Sadly, Yeast says she may never get her $500 deposit back, but reporting the fraud and seeing something done about it was empowering.
"I will tell anybody who will listen to be careful with opportunities that sound too good to be true," she told AOL.
"I mean, of course it's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed. I'm smart. I am college educated. And I got duped. But if I say nothing about it, the scammers keep doing it to other people. So I tell people, 'I know. I get it. Even though you wonder if it's too good to be true, you'll just try anything to work, to feed your kids, to find your next mortgage payment. But that's how you get hooked.'"
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