Orleans Detective Andrew McLaughlin has scored some rare victories fighting crimes involving telephone and computer scams.
In one case, a woman wired thousands of dollars to her nephew in a foreign country. In another case, he tracked down a scammer who rented a non-existent beach house to an unsuspecting couple..
In the first case, the nephew was an imposter who tried to use family loyalty to wrest money from a concerned aunt. In the second case, a couple fell for an amazing deal during the height of summer. The scammer used details from a vacation rental website and posted it to Craigslist.
February 2021
The FTC takes in reports from consumers about problems they experience in the marketplace. On October 22, 2020, the FTC launched ReportFraud.ftc.gov, a new site for people to report fraud and other illegal business practices. As always, reports from consumers are stored in the Consumer Sentinel Network (Sentinel), a secure online database available only to law enforcement. While the FTC does not intervene in individual consumer disputes, its law enforcement partners – whether they are down the street, across the nation, or around the world – can use information in the database to spot trends, identify questionable business practices and targets, and enforce the law.
The Federal Trade Commission received more than 2.1 million fraud reports from consumers in 2020, according to newly released data, with imposter scams remaining the most common type of fraud reported to the agency.
Online shopping was the second-most common fraud category reported by consumers, elevated by a surge of reports in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Internet services; prizes, sweepstakes, and lotteries; and telephone and mobile services rounded out the top five fraud categories.
Consumers reported losing more than $3.3 billion to fraud in 2020, up from $1.8 billion in 2019. Nearly $1.2 billion of losses reported last year were due to imposter scams, while online shopping accounted for about $246 million in reported losses from consumers.