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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:58 am
Time: 12:58 am
Results for consumer fraud (australia)
3 results foundAuthor: Bartels, Lorana Title: Sentencing Scammers: Law and Practice Summary: Consumer fraud costs Australians almost $1b a year and most of this fraud involves scams in which individuals are persuaded to part with an upfront, or advance, fee, with the promise of large financial or other gain in the future. In this paper, consideration is given to the sentencing issues that apply in cases of this nature. In particular, the author examines the application of the key sentencing purposes, such as deterrence and rehabilitation, and the sentencing principles applied by courts, such as the proportionality principle, and the challenges that may arise in this context. Key sentencing factors often cited in aggravation or mitigation are also reviewed, before an examination of some of the issues relating to specific sentencing options is undertaken. This paper goes some way in providing a brief analysis of sentencing practices. However, further research is required to better explore how sentencers respond to consumer fraud matters. Details: Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2012. 7p. Source: Internet Resource: Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice No. 443: Accessed September 10, 2012 at: http://www.aic.gov.au/en/publications/current%20series/tandi/441-460/tandi443.aspx Year: 2012 Country: Australia URL: http://www.aic.gov.au/en/publications/current%20series/tandi/441-460/tandi443.aspx Shelf Number: 126283 Keywords: Consumer Fraud (Australia)Consumer ProtectionDeterrenceFinancial CrimesSentencing |
Author: Jorna, Penny Title: Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce: Results of the 2012 online consumer fraud survey Summary: The Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT) comprises 22 government regulatory agencies and departments in Australia and New Zealand that work alongside private sector, community and non-government partners to prevent fraud. The ACFT has conducted a range of fraud prevention and awareness-raising activities since 2006. One key activity of the ACFT is to hold an annual consumer fraud survey to obtain a snapshot of the public’s exposure to consumer scams, to assess their impact, to determine how victims respond and to identify emerging typologies and issues. As the survey participants were not randomly sampled, the survey findings are not representative of the general population. The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) is a member of the ACFT and chair of the research sub-group. This report presents the results of the 2012 survey, which ran for three months commencing from 1 January 2012. This period encompassed National Fraud Prevention Week, which coincides with global awareness-raising activities. The theme of the 2012 campaign was Slam Scams! This theme aimed to raise awareness about scam delivery methods so that scams could be identified at the point of contact. The survey explored scams where respondents were contacted by phone, short message service (SMS), email, letter, via the internet and/or in person by someone who they did not know in relation to: having won a lottery or some other prize (lottery scams); a request for assistance to transfer money out of another country (such as Nigeria) (advance fee frauds); a notification of an inheritance (inheritance scams); a request by a business to confirm personal details or passwords (phishing scams); a request to supply financial advice (financial advice scams); an opportunity to work from home (a front for money laundering) (work from home scams); pursuing a personal relationship that turned out to be false (dating scams); a person representing themselves as someone from a computer support centre (computer support scams); and other fraud types. The survey was made available for completion on the AIC’s website. Participants who did not reside in Australia or New Zealand were excluded from the survey, as were invalid responses. In 2012, 1,576 participants completed the survey. Outliers, typically very large loss figures from respondents who appeared to have misunderstood the question, were removed from the analysis. The 2012 survey suffered from a number of limitations that made it difficult to generalise its findings to the greater Australasian population, in particular the self-selection bias of the survey design. As the sample was not randomly selected, those who participated in the survey may be different from the general population. Details: Sydney: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2013. 39p. Source: Internet Resource: Technical and background paper series no.56: Accessed June 25, 2013 at: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tbp/41-60/tbp056.html Year: 2013 Country: Australia URL: http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tbp/41-60/tbp056.html Shelf Number: 129155 Keywords: Consumer Fraud (Australia)Consumer ProtectionFinancial Crimes |
Author: Jorna, Penny Title: Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce: results of the 2013 online consumer fraud survey Summary: Since 2007, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has collected information on consumer scams by conducting an online survey of Australians who have received scam invitations during the preceding 12 months. The research is conducted on behalf of the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT), which comprises 22 government regulatory agencies and departments in Australia and New Zealand.The annual survey seeks to obtain a snapshot of the public's exposure to consumer scams, to assess the range of ways in which scams can affect victims and their families, to determine how victims respond and to identify emerging typologies, and look at issues that could be used to inform fraud prevention initiatives. As in previous years, a high proportion of respondents to the survey had received a scam invitation (97%), with just over a third of the respondents responding to the scam invitation in some way. Last year, four percent of respondents reported having lost money to a scam, with the median amount of money reported as being lost per incident was $2,150-just over $1,110,000 lost in total. Fraudulent lottery and prizes wins were the most prevalent scam type experienced by respondents in 2013. While email remained the most commonly used method by which scams were delivered, consistent with previous years, scams delivered via landline and mobile telephones continued to increase. Details: Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2015 76p. Source: Internet Resource: AIC Reports, Technical and Background Paper 58: Accessed February 26, 2015 at: http://aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/tbp/tbp058/tbp058.pdf Year: 2015 Country: Australia URL: http://aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/tbp/tbp058/tbp058.pdf2015. 76p. Shelf Number: 134678 Keywords: Consumer Fraud (Australia)Consumer ProtectionFinancial Crimes |