Conversations with Fraud Fighters - Les Henderson and Ed Dickson
Last week, I had the good fortune to talk with both Les Henderson, the creator of the Crimes of Persuasion website, and Ed Dickson, who blogs about Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds.
Both Les and Ed are seeing a lot more advanced fee scams, involving fake cheques, postal orders, or in some cases American Express Gift Cheques. Ed made the excellent point, in conversation, that a number of financial agencies are passively involved in innocently enabling fraud. For example, except for Ed's post, I have seen no warning from American Express about their gift cheques. Until we shift liability to these gatekeepers, we are simply asking for money to be laundered through these scams, and will see more of these frauds.
Les made a good observation about the difficulty of an individual writing a blog on consumer protection. The legal bills defending defamation suits, often baseless, impose a heavy cost on the ordinary individual blogger. Worse, the regulators appear entirely unaware of the consumer protection blogs or websites. Les, whose site is over 5 years old and has tried to keep the public aware of various scams, has a high alexa ranking, laments that at various fraud/scam conferences Canadian regulators did not know of, visit, or monitor his site.
The divide between the public and and private when it comes to publicizing fraud should not exist. I had a submission to the FTC on this point. We are all trying to keep the public aware of the frauds and scams out there. Let's not have an artificial divide between public and private websites.
Technorati Tags: american express gift cheques, crimes of persuasion, defamation suits, scams, blogger, ed dickson, excellent point, shift liability, legal bills, postal orders, gatekeepers, good fortune, consumer protection, frauds, phishing, regulators
