Jamaican lottery scams, a violent business
Press consumer advocate Bill Brooks was threatened last week by phone by a scam artist calling from Jamaica.
“He threatened to kill me, and my family, and kept saying, ‘In Jamaica we have lots of guns and people that know how to use them,’” wrote Bill, in his column published today.
Based on an article by the Economist, the guy wasn’t kidding.
Scamming, and violence stemming from it, is so prevalent in one Jamaican tourist area that officials have declared a state of emergency there.
From the story published on economist.com:
One cause of the mayhem is scams in which callers, using skills honed at St James’s call centres and contact lists purloined from them, ring up mainly elderly Americans to tell them they’ve won a lottery. The prize is fictitious; the fees paid by the victim to claim it are not.
The scam has lower barriers to entry than the business of shipping Colombian cocaine to the United States, another thriving activity in Jamaica. Weapons for both come from the exchange of drugs for guns with Haiti. Scammers fight over access to contact lists. Couriers bringing in cash sometimes abscond, provoking revenge killings. Gunmen rob scammers when they pick up loot at remittance agencies.