Scams

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a wave of Ponzi schemes swept through Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Solomon Islands. U-Vistract, the most notorious scheme, along with other fast money schemes, attracted 300,000 investors, enticing them with promises of 100 percent interest to be paid monthly. Its founder, Noah Musingku, was a charismatic leader who promoted the scheme as a form of Christian mission and as the basis for establishing an independent kingdom.
Fast Money Schemes uses in-depth interviews with investors, newspaper accounts, and participant observation to understand the scheme’s appeal from the point of view of those who invested and lost, showing that organizers and investors alike understood the scheme as a way of accessing and participating in a global economy. John Cox delivers a “post-village” ethnography that gives insight into the lives of urban, middle-class Papua New Guineans, a group that is not familiar to US readers and that has seldom been a focus of anthropological interest. The book’s concern with understanding the interweaving of morality, finance, and aspirations shared by a global cosmopolitan middle class has wide resonance beyond studies of Papua New Guinea and anthropology.

While there are no new frauds, internet technology provides new opportunities for fraudsters by facilitating volumes of attacks that law enforcement then struggles to address. Moreover, since context can affect how potential victims respond to frauds, crisis context influences how fraudsters design frauds. This article assesses fraudsters’ fraud design strategies during two external crisis events that impacted Australia: The Black Summer Bushfires that occurred from September 2019 to March 2020 and the onset and first year of the COVID-19 pandemic that occurred from January 2020 through January 2021. Targets, during these crises, were more likely to be vulnerable according to Steinmetz’s model victim for social engineering framework. This study shows that, in both crises, fraudsters deployed the social engineering techniques of “authority” and “scarcity,” techniques that are more likely to be successful based solely on initial contact. Fraudsters designed their requests to be easily actioned and crafted their scams to reference very recent events as the external crisis events evolved. Thus, they targeted broad audiences with minimal personal involvement. Furthermore, this study shows that fraudsters, when disseminating their scams via social media outlets, attempted to build “social proof” to expand their potential victim pool to include the marks’ social circles.

Debates about Fundamentalist Christianity as anthropology’s “repugnant other” have provided a lively set of reflections since Susan Harding’s influential article was published in 1991.  Anthropologists wishing to study fundamentalist Christians have struggled to legitimise this interest to their peers. Similarly, liberal theologians regard the emergence of prosperity theology as a form of sanctified greed. For those concerned with the ecological crisis, as an endorsement of the very values of commodification that disturb the proper relations between God, people and planet.  Both anthropologists and theologians have placed the prosperity gospel on the margins of their projects of inquiry.
This paper seeks to explore the apparent gap between liberal intellectuals and populist Pentecostal practice by considering the dynamics of fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea (PNG). These Ponzi schemes spread through Christian churches both Pentecostal and mainline, using the language of prosperity theology. Their success indicates a broad reach of these ideas that includes some more liberal Papua New Guinean intellectuals and makes them a “mainstream” phenomenon within PNG. My anthropological analysis of middle class Christian investors in fast money schemes indicates deeper and more philanthropic moral engagements than is commonly thought possible by critics of the prosperity gospel who see it as motivated by individualistic greed.

This dissertation in cultural anthropology explores the cultural construction of the Chinese market economy through the lens of a charismatic, now-banned global network marketing movement. Throughout the 1990s, millions of people across China participated in pyramid-like businesses. I am especially interested in analyzing the production of faith in market reforms, and the role of revolutionary socialist narratives practices and histories within this process. I focus on the radical remaking of the self that was undertaken by chuanxiao marketers, on the workings of transnational network economies that located participants within new sets of hierarchies while promising to liberate them from others, and on the production of new notions of inner self, bodily experience, and sociality. These issues are unsnarled by a chronicle of the development of the industry from 1990 to the government ban in 1998, and detailed analyses of on-the-ground practices from within several Taiwanese-, American-, and Chinese-owned firms. I offer ethnographic accounts of, among other things, intensive training seminars that aimed to transform participant’s psychological and physical sensibilities; narratives of authenticity, artifice, and miraculous healing; corporate scandals and the battle for employee loyalty; and the grand visions of one group of pro-MLM bureaucrats. Chinese MLM emerged at the nexus of would-be-global American rhetorics of free enterprise and individuality, and the civilizing discourse of the contemporary Chinese state (within which Maoist-era notions of voluntarism and self-transformation are central). The dissertation suggests that the economic domain is generated through cultural struggles over morality and meaning, rather than through individual acts of rational choice and abstract self-interest.

Title: The Relationship between Frequency of Online Scams to the
Age of the Selected E-Wallet Users in Quezon City

Researchers:
Bautista, Earl Lawrence U.
Cirunay, Eliana J.
Cuesta, Mariel Johnel S.
Quimora, Maverick Jhumar I.
Sarsalejo, Stephanie G.
Torla, Mariel Denise L.
Victoria, Hannah Faith A.

Adviser: Ms. Lumanlan, Sarah

School: Technological Institute of the Philippines

Track: Academic

Strand: Accountancy, Business, and Management (ABM)

Course: Practical Research 2 (HS RES ABM 002)

Year: Academic Year 2021-2022

The risk of fraud and exposure to various scams and other forms of criminal activity are ever present. Directors and boards of companies that have been victims of hacking and fraud may be tempted to conceal what has happened in order to avoid damaging relationships with stakeholders that are built upon trust, but they should also recognise that sharing their experience and collaborating with law enforcement agencies may help collective responses.

Published as: Coulson-Thomas, Colin (2017), Fraud, Directors and the Board, Director Today, Vol. III, Issue V, May pp 55-57

This thesis examines Papua New Guinean attitudes to money and modernity through an exploration of contemporary “fast money schemes” (Ponzi scams). The largest of these, U-Vistract Financial Systems, collected millions of Kina from 100,000s of “investors” on the promise of monthly returns on deposits of 100%. The scheme was declared bankrupt in 2000 but its founders escaped imprisonment, fleeing first to Solomon Islands and then to the “no go” zone of Bougainville, where the scheme re-established itself as the Royal Kingdom of Papala.

U-Vistract claimed to be a Christian reform of global finance systems that would deliver abundant prosperity to Papua New Guineans. U-Vistract cultivated a moral vision of its middle-class investors as compassionate Christian patrons whose coming wealth would deliver “development” to a nation disillusioned with social inequality and the postcolonial state.   

U-Vistract investors emerge from this study as morally engaged members of a transnational Christian civil society. This is a surprising conclusion to draw from studying fraud but it is all the more surprising in Papua New Guinea where anthropological interest has historically constructed the “village” as the central place where social meanings are generated. Here, urban Melanesians demonstrate moral and relational sensibilities that combine global aspirations for prosperity with Papua New Guinean disillusionment with the nation. In doing so, perhaps a more individualistic rendering of Melanesia emerges but these are individuals who are also more cosmopolitan in sentiment.

Corporate governance became an area of huge interest after the collapse of few giant firms, like Enron Corporation, MCI Inc. etc. Banking sector portraits the whole economy of a country. Bangladesh Bank, the central bank of Bangladesh, provides guidelines for the banking sector and all commercial banks have to follow those guidelines in order to operate their business in Bangladesh. If financial sector collapses, the whole economy will also collapse. Hallmark Group made a BDT 4000 crore scam. Six commercial banks were involved with BDT 200 crore loan scam of Bismillah Group. Basic Bank scam of BDT 4,500 crore loan approval without proper documentation and scrutiny has brought the issue to the fore again. Such fraudulent activities indicate lack of corporate governance practices in the banks. So, this study was initiated to critically observe the current Corporate Governance status and practices in the banking sector of Bangladesh. The study was descriptive in nature. Convenient sampling method was used to select the sample banks for the study. The study found that top management influence as well as political pressure exists in banking sector which affect the lending decisions. Corrupted bankers and dishonest officials of Bangladesh Bank were found associated with several scams. Proper documentation is mandatory but sometimes banks show flexibility in this regards and provide extra benefits to the clients. Selection of wrong borrower, unhealthy competition among the banks, fund diversion, inefficient auditing and insufficient collateral cause major harm to the banks. Sometimes banks do not follow the rules and guidelines provided by Bangladesh Bank properly which were actually designed to protect themselves and operate business smoothly.

Purpose-The emergence of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has threatened physical and mental health, and changed the behaviour and decision-making processes of individuals, organisations, and institutions worldwide. As many services move online due to the pandemic, COVID-19-themed cyber fraud is also growing. This article explores cyber fraud victimization and cyber security threats during COVID-19 using psychological and traditional criminological theories. It also provides a COVID-19-themed cyber fraud typology using empirical evidence from institutional and agency reports. Through organizing COVID-19themed cyber fraud into four different categorizations, we aim to offer classification insights to researchers and industry professionals so that stakeholders can effectively manage emerging cyber fraud risks in our current pandemic. Design/methodology/approach-The approach the study take for this conceptual paper is typology.

Cyber-crime cases involving women, especially single mothers are becoming one of the most serious social issues. Technological acceleration becomes a new mechanism in making single mothers as a major target of catfish. Catfish can be defined as an individual who uses the second identity to attract the attention of victims of cyber-love crime by giving a perfect shadow to his opponent. The objective of this study is to identify the major factors contributing to the crime of cyber-love from the perspective of the victim's experiences involving five informants through an in-depth interview. The findings show that the main medium used by catfish in trapping single mothers is through Facebook. Meanwhile, the major contributing factors to cyber-crime crimes are categorized into two main themes which are the social environment and interpersonal attraction.

Since the introduction of money into Melanesia in the colonial period, monetised modes of exchange have had transformative effects on social life, producing new forms of economic inequality, consumer aspiration and political affiliation. These profound shifts in Melanesian understandings of wealth are examined in this chapter through an exploration of how contemporary money schemes, broadly understood, articulate various economic aspects of a Melanesian modern social imaginary that reflects an awareness of the relative position of Melanesians within the global economy. The first section considers three long- running ‘fast money schemes’ (two from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and one from Solomon Islands) that mimic practices of
investment, compensation and development assistance and so project imaginings of a prosperous society onto existing narratives of nationhood. The second section concentrates on multi- level marketing schemes, microfinance and other business oriented programmes, focusing on their projects of entrepreneurial self-formation.

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U-Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U-Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.

Unsolicited emails and online scams can erode both consumer confidence and consumer safety when interacting and transacting over the Internet. This paper uses content analysis to identify the most frequent psychological tricks used in scamming and the most frequent flags which alert consumers to the illegitimate and unsolicited nature of the contact. Findings are then explored in light of individual thinking styles to reveal how some consumers may be more vulnerable to online scams as a result of their own personal preference for thinking in a particular way. The rationale is to establish a foundation for the use of content analysis of unsolicited emails to offer insight into the possible relationship between a consumer’s style of thinking and online victimization.

In 2018 and 2019, I received letters in Texas mailed from France bearing what appeared to be Marianne self-adhesive stamps.  The contents were typical Nigerian-type scam letters with contact information in Barcelona.  On further inspection, the stamps were found to be offset lithographed copies of the genuine line engraved stamps.  As such, they are a newer version of the crude color photocopies of stamps used on Nigerian scam letters mailed in the 1990s, before the scammers migrated to emails.  Similar offset lithographed forged U.S. stamps have been marketed at discount from face.  Those are believed to have been manufactured in China where these probably also were made.

Este artículo examina el viaje y el engaño como opciones para alcanzar las aspiraciones que se han ido perfilando en las sociedades de África Occidental a partir del inicio del siglo xxi. Se basa en su mayor parte en un proyecto de investigación realizado en Dakar, Senegal, entre 2009 y 2012, y retoma aspectos puntuales de otro proyecto realizado en Quito, Ecuador, entre 2014 y 2015. Ambos lugares son puntos en los que se detienen los itinerarios de africanos que buscan mejores horizontes fuera del continente. En las historias de estos africanos, el viaje y el engaño aparecen entrelazados. Este artículo describe la manera en que estos dos elementos moldean las experiencias de la realidad de mis interlocutores. Igualmente, se pregunta por la relación que el viaje y el engaño tienen con la incertidumbre, los modelos emergentes de éxito social y el sentido arraigado de la aventura.

This paper explores the relationship between the literature on the issue of control and the realities of the hospitality industry. Management control is related to the unsanctioned entrepreneurial activities of operatives (illustrated by the ‘taxi scam’), the failure of computer systems used to control operatives, and the failure of the hospitality industry to exploit the potential of the new technology. The paper suggests that management's (and a significant part of the literature in this area) failure within hospitality is linked to the perception of the role of the hospitality manager as one of policing the industry.

Internet criminals create fake websites that mimic real websites and use them for advance fee fraud or other criminal activities. Over the last ten years members of the vigilante scambaiting community ‘Artists against 419’ maintain the biggest open-access database of fake websites. They use ‘passive reconnaissance’ and ‘open source intelligence’ (osit) tools to gather information to file reports with the hosting provider to get the websites taken off the web. This chapter takes a closer look at the group’s strategies and explains the artistic research installation called ‘Megacorp.’ that visualises a sample probe of 1000 websites from the database collection.

Gambling and financial investment have a long shared history, with many convergences and many
moments where each has defined the other as its opposite. In the contemporary Pacific, not least among
evangelical Christians, gambling is often understood as wasteful entertainment and even as an irresponsible
vice. Investment on the other hand is seen as a productive activity for both individuals and
society at large. These moral concerns draw on discourses of proprietorship of the self, of money and of
risk. This paper explores moral attitudes to gambling/investment among middle-class investors in a mass
Ponzi scheme in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and charts new valorizations of risk and investment as
components of the construction of modern ‘financial selves’.
Keywords: gambling, investment, fraud, Christianity, Papua New Guinea.

Read Creative Ways with Money if you’re tired of the hype and promises and instead want to learn ways to:
• spot a fake and invest elsewhere
• invest in shares with just $5 to spare 
• start a side business
• start to think creatively about your money zone

So come along, bring your fears out of the dark cupboard. Find out why you should make your own financial choices, confidently, to design your life the way you want it to be. 

Proving that it’s easy to make poor financial decisions when emotion is in charge, Jennifer Lancaster tells of her experiences, various scam stories and interesting psychological principles... to fully inform new investors. 

See: https://www.amazon.com.au/Creative-Ways-Money-Protect-Enhance-ebook/dp/B083XW2QC1/

For its focal points this text takes (a) the least form of state-mandated automobile insurance in Michigan, the ​ no-fault​ policy; plus (b) the notoriously unaffordable cost to consumers of no-fault insurance in Detroit; plus (c) the low-ball estimate that 50% of motorists whose vehicles are registered in Michigan's urban areas drive without auto insurance, as compared to 16% statewide; plus (d) Detroit is the largest urban city in Michigan, Detroit also happens to be the largest U.S. city in which a majority of the population identifies as Black. With these four focal points set briefly in context, I have sought to evaluate Michigan's no-fault law in terms of its disparate impact to the detriment of Black Americans.

TRANSCRIPT
Papua New Guinea's resources boom could leave the country more susceptible to fraudsters and ponzi schemes, according to new research by the Australian National University.
John Cox has been studying the effect of fast money schemes like the U-Vistract scheme a decade ago, and why so many members of PNG's educated middle class fall for them.
He told Jamie Tahana that over 500 million kina has been lost to such schemes since 1998.
JOHN COX: I guess one thing I want to say at the start is that people fall for these kind of scams all over the world. You know, Australians send a lot of money to Nigeria, a lot of Americans fell for the Bernie Madoff scam so I guess these kinds of scams happen wherever money goes and wherever finance flows. So I'm not saying that Papua New Guineans are more gullible than else. So what I've discovered from the interviews that I've done with lots of Papua New Guineans is there's an element of greed but underneath it all there's also a really strong moral dimension to it.
JAMIE TAHANA: Just take us through what you've found with this research. Because it started with this thing in Bougainville didn't it?
JC: Yeah, the biggest scam was called U-Vistract and it's still kind of running out of Bougainville. So it was set up by Bougainvillians and spread through church networks, it spread through professional groups and it was really able to present itself as a way to make fast money and I guess the way these scams operate - they pay a few people out at the beginning, usually high level people so everybody knows them, everybody hears a story that this person made 10 thousand and the word gets around and people flood in and eventually they can't pay anymore and so they had to make explanations as to why. So I guess I looked at 'how can this scam keep going for 15 years and hasn't paid anybody since the year 2000?' But part of the stories these people started to tell their investors was 'look, it's not us. The government's stopped us from paying you, we've got our money overseas in a bank account in Singapore or somewhere and we want to transfer it into PNG but the government won't allow us to because they're corrupt, or because they're jealous of us' and that kind of stuff. So they're able to play on peoples lack of trust in the PNG state and manipulate them in that way.
JT: We do have a lot of development projects going on right now in PNG, especially with the mineral and resource projects going on right now. Does this make them kind of more susceptible?
JC: The resource projects certainly do create expectations that everybody should be wealthy, so what I'm hearing from the people that I speak to is 'PNG's a rich country we shouldn't need to have aid programmes, we shouldn't have poor people here, there's something wrong with our system' and they often blame it on corruption, sometimes they'll blame it on the Australian colonial history, but more often it becomes a what we call a negative nationalist account. They say 'we're underdeveloped it's because our politicians are corrupt.' What I'd say is background conditions don't necessarily create scams in themselves. So this U-Vistract scam really was a very, very ingenious and well thought-out attempt to defraud hundreds of thousands of people and that had an organisational structure, it had networks of influence that really drew people in and made itself seem real to them for quite a long time.

Scamming users of online dating sites has rapidly increased in recent years. According to the Federal Trade Commission, 21,000 online dating scams were reported in 2018, with total reported losses of $143 million. A common tactic used by scammers to trick dating site users is using celebrity profile photos to increase attractiveness. In this paper, we present a prototype tool to assist online dating users in identifying scammers and interacting safely on online dating platforms. The tool recognizes celebrity photos in online dating profiles and identifies the associated profiles as possible fakes, thereby equipping online dating site users with a method to discover scammers. We created fake profiles using celebrity and non-celebrity photos to evaluate the tool's effectiveness. The tool evaluation results were satisfactory. This work aims to increase public awareness of and alert users to signs of scams on online dating websites.

Advance fee and non-delivery frauds have become very common with the growing preference for online shopping and the new opportunities this brings for online offenders. This
article uses unique access to a volunteer group’s database focused on preventing pet scams to
explore this type of crime. Distances, among other factors, make the purchase of pets online
common in countries such as the USA, Australia and South Africa. This modality of purchase
has been exploited by organized criminals largely based in Cameroon to conduct advance fee
and non-delivery frauds. The article uses data from the volunteer group Petscams.com to
provide unique insights on the techniques of the offenders with particular reference to the
strategies used to maximize victimization by using real accounts of victims of such frauds.
It also briefly notes how the COVID-19 crisis has been used to adapt this type of scam. The
article’s discussion identifies the need for a more nuanced assessment into the role of victim
oriented voluntary organizations.

This article analyzes the experience of Africans stranded in Dakar, Senegal, halfway
through their intended journeys out of the continent. A number of forces such as regimes of border control and visa policies, a culturally rooted sense of adventure,
historically established networks, and individual genius shape their itineraries. These
forces lead them to Dakar, prevent the continuation of their journeys, and bend their
routes and destinations toward the global South. I turn to the notions of errance and
elsewheres to describe the spatial and temporal dimensions of this experience, its
particular relation to national borders, and the sense of uncertainty pervading it.
Errance can be understood as the quest for an acceptable place, while elsewheres
describe imagined, distant, malleable destinations that invest a journey with purpose.
They not only relate to the there and then of dreams and aspirations but structure
relations to the here and now. Academic literatures on migration, economic crises,
and border studies generally theorize the experience of being able to leave home in
terms of suspension. I extend this literature by examining the ways in which space
and time are experienced in an already-begun but interrupted journey. Past and
future, actual and potential, destinations, routes, and frail transactions hint at
different ways of understanding movement and stasis.

Recently there was an incident that need attention of those who want to help our cause in Niger Delta. One member from Niger Delta asked me to give 80,000 naira (approx. $500) when I asked him to take a few photos in classrooms of his school. I was only thinking that he would just pass his photos with his mobile phone and send it to me for free of charge. So I was astounded by his request, of course. Later on I asked him, “How do you justify this amount?” “Oh, you don’t remember? You asked me to take photos in the field with crew members in oil polluted zone! This requires quite strict security.” I scrolled back the email conversations and I saw clearly that I was asking him to take a few photos in a classroom—not outside field. When I confronted him again, he said that someone entered his email system to send me email pretending it was him. I asked him to create another email account. He said he couldn’t because someone break into his email every month…

The book aims to assist the reader to make informed consumer decisions. This knowledge may aid consumers to avoid legal and illegal scams and preserve their scarce financial resources.

This book is about legal and illegal scams perpetrated by marketers and sellers against consumers. It is the first book in a series. The second book in this series looks at ways in which some consumers may scam businesses.