The Art of the Steal
Frank W. Abagnale's book "The Art of the Steal" is best when it focuses on personal identity theft and how to protect against it. While the book does discuss frauds in general, such as ponzi schemes, investment fraud, and business opportunity fraud, there is not a great deal of detailed insight about these schemes.
But with personal identity theft Abagnale has a real feel for how the social world of the internet has increased our desire for immediacy of transactions with the consequent loss of privacy. There is an important tradeoff between our economic interest in doing business in faceless transactions and our privacy. Abagnale counsels a very strict program of privacy protection, including shreding personal mail and using only one time credit cards over the internet.
Besides this counsel, there is an interesting fact, relevant to business opportunity due diligence, apparently from the period 1995 - 2000, the SEC was only able to collect 17 cents on the dollar for every investment scam. The FTC's numbers for recovering real money from business opportunities fraud is lower than this.
So if you are investing $10,000 in a business opportunity, why wouldn't you spend $400 to find out whether you are going to lose all but 17% of your investment? My estimate of $400.00 is what it would take to write all the state regulators and collect information about the biz op. Generally, these letters would reveal that the biz op seller is not registered - the number one sign for fraud. Until biz ip purchasers become as serious about investigating the seller as Abagnale wants us to be about protecting our own personal identity, biz op fraud will continue.
Technorati Tags: personal identity theft, personal mail, business opportunity fraud, ponzi schemes, privacy protection, abagnale, investment fraud, due diligence, tradeoff, immediacy, frauds
