I’m watching the docuseries Love Rats on Netflix, a series about people who have been scammed out of thousands of pounds by their partners / friends etc. It’s a UK series, if it’s not available elsewhere think of it like Tinder Swindler – mostly women meeting men via online dating who then aren’t who they say they are and manage to scam them out of a significant amount of money.
A lot of these people have lost so much, £50,000-£200,000, and none of them are able to get any back even if the person committing fraud against them has been arrested and charged – why is that?
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Generally it’s because the person who scammed them doesn’t have the money to give them.
And then you have things like the person who scammed them is from a different country, and that makes things really hard. Especially if the country they’re from isn’t friendly with the country the person that got scammed is from..
Or if that country doesn’t really see anything as being wrong.
For example, if i convinced you to give me money because i know if a “sure deal,” and i just spent the money and gave you nothing back. Without some type of legal document outlining the deal, it’s pretty much a “sucks to be you” situation.
Depends on the amount. I was “scammed”/ was a victim of fraud, or whatever the hell happened (we have no idea how it happened, I had my card, had not given my info to anyone, we assume someone hacked a website I had bought something from and kept the info, even though the company is not supposed to do that, and for some reason the normal security settings didn’t get set off), someone got access to my bank info and withdrew about €500, i reported it to the bank, closed my card and reported it to NETS, which is, don’t know how to explain it properly, but they administer card and money higher up in my country, and got my money back the day after
It was so weird, I had 25 withdraws from Facebook on my bank account suddenly, started on €2 and then moved up higher and higher, it happened in one night, I have never bought anything on Facebook, even the bank lady said it looked very, very weird and she didn’t know how it was possible and how no security had been set off
Anyways, point is, mine was a (relatively) small amount and I got it back immediately – but it wasn’t tied to a person, I didn’t personally transfer my money to anybody
Most of the scams are international. Trying to work with 3 or 4 police departments and 3 or 4 court systems to find the right jurisdiction to sue is difficult and expensive. The small poor country that actually has jurisdiction may have corrupt courts, or they don’t actually want to spend the resources to lock up or take money from one of their own citizens, to benefit someone who is not a citizen of their country.
Also realize that in that small poor country, the “stolen” money would go directly in their local economy, so it benefits their economy even if its “wrong”….
The US could try to sanction/tariff that country, but that only works if there’s enough legit business for that foreign government to lose to make them care….
Yes to the other answers already, about the guilty not having thr money to give back. And also important to note that debt only exists because someone somewhere is making money from that debt. No-one would lend someone the money, knowing that person could never pay it back. It’s similar when your car gets hit by an uninsured driver. The uninsured person could still get arrested and prosecuted. But you still lose money. You can’t make an insurance claim, unless you are covered for uninsured incidents. In the UK this is an extra add-on, and I think only some do it.
Because our system is rigged. If any kind of scam, steal, and whatever you pose a debt over the culprit to repay the money with interests, and the debt to be inherited by rhe family, that would have ment the bankrupcy of many dinasties that run the world.
To get money back you need 1 of 2 things:
1 – insurance — the insurance will pay you for money lost due to xyz. There isn’t fraud insurance in that sense.
2- a lawsuit happens causing a party to have to pay you back. For example if I sue google for 100 million, and win, google will pay me (abit kicking and screaming) because google has far more than that in their bank and earns more per day.
If I was to sue joe schmoe who owes me money, if he has no assets equaling what he owes, he may end up in jail for fraud, but that money isn’t really coming from anywhere. Furthermore if I am not mistaken, in freedomland (usa), you cannot force a person to sell the house he lives in to pay off court debt, though you can put a lien on that house.
I have spent quite a few years working with the fraud team at a bank.
The short answer is that the fraudster doesn’t have the money.
Most of the cases I dealt with were organised crime, where there are separate people designing the fraud, setting it up and running it, as well as a whole network response for laundering the money. They would normally start with some mules sending the money internationally, and go from there.
Most of the rest were addicts. Again, the money was gone almost as soon as it arrived. To give one example, the office manager at a small company. The company had been struggling financially for years before the owner finally realised that a whole lot of the invoices were fake.
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