What is the Cost of Utah Scammers?

Jun 032010

Criminal Cost?

Poison Apples

A week may be a long time in politics, but it takes several years for anti-crime agencies to crack down on scammers… This is my observation on all the various scams perpetrated on folk by such smiling scum as Pacific WebWorks and Jesse Willms.

Salt Lake Tribune (SLT)

The fine publication, SLT, always seems ahead of the game with it’s prompt and accurate reporting of the shenanigans in it’s home state of Utah, USA. Today they’ve headlined a news release of a joint law enforcement agency called the “Utah Securities Fraud Task Force” (USFTF) where they estimate that Utahs alone have lost $1.4bn to the criminals. This is $1,400,000,000 written out full. See the full story here:

Utahns have lost $1.4 billion in suspected frauds – By Tom Harvey: The Salt Lake Tribune

According to the USFTF, 370 scammers have been operating in the state of Utah and have scammed 4,400 folks. Some of them are investment fraud etc, some small time amounts of 1-200 dollars. But it all adds up to an average of $328k per fraud, which seems a bit high.

Worldwide?

Too Much Credit But what is the cost worldwide?

From articles and comment within these very pages I’ve seen hundreds of people scammed by the Utah cut-purse merchants.

Tie these to the hundreds or even thousands of complaints about the scammers on consumer portals like Complaints Board, Google itself, Yahoo and the small army of websites specialising in on-line scams, and we see an absolutely huge mountain of personal debt, all paid to keep the thieving scammers in their lazy lifestyle choice.