Chapter 9 story about scams

A few little things have happened in my life where I’ve felt ripped off, cheated or defrauded. On a regular basis I receive e-mails telling me I’ve been left with a large sum of money from someone who died and left it to me in my will. I have received messages from people telling me I have somehow managed to be able to have millions of dollars wired into my bank account.

The perpetrators use good names for their e-mail subject lines so that I click on it and think it’s someone offering me a job or internship opportunity, or something like that. However, once I start reading the e-mail, the grammar is always very bad and that let’s me know right off the bat something is wrong. I also don’t trust these outlandish claims so I ignore them and delete them right away. I think if I really have that money coming to me, it’s going to reach me whether I answer the e-mail about it or not.

I read chapter 9 in the Investigative Journalism book. It said that reporters have multiple ways of finding out information about scammers and revealing who they are. Reporters can obtain information from their readers or viewers who call into the media about the scams they have bought into.

Many different organizations assist in alerting people about possible scammers or helping them in a case. The Better Business Bureau is one such organization. Others are attorneys, consumer advocates in government agencies and privately funded consumer protection organizations. Examples of these are special departments in the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. There are also professional organizations of bankers and bill collectors who don’t want scammers hurting their businesses.

For my particular case with the fraudulent e-mails, I would go to the Better Business Bureau, which is aware of these kinds of problems. I would use the bureau’s archives to find other people in the area who may have complained about these e-mails. I would go to the National Consumers League to tap into its information center that has an Internet Fraud Watch, too.

Another thing I could do to find the perpetrators is to go undercover. I would go along a little bit with the e-mail scheme by replying to their first message. I would not give out any information, but I would record all the e-mails sent to me. Then I will write about these dealings.