Springhill Group Home: Top 10 Fraud Schemes

http://newscenter.springhillgrouphome.com/2012/03/springhill-group-home-top-10-fraud-schemes/

For the twelfth successive year, identity theft topped the consumer complaint database of the Federal Trade Commission with the largest number of complaints, perhaps owing to the rampant use (and misuse) of online services such as social networking and e-commerce websites.

From the 1.8 million complaints the FTC got in 2011, almost 300,000 are about identity theft. The information of FTC has included complaints filed to them or from other states and federal consumer protection groups.

Most of the complaints of identity theft are coming from consumers saying that their personal details are used in government documents without their knowledge, with scammers aiming to collect benefits. Last year, government-related identity theft was 27% of the total complaints in that category, increasing by 11% since 2009. Accounting for the 14% of identity theft complaints is credit card fraud, with the rest consisting of complaints of bank, utilities and phone fraud.

More than half of all the complaints last year were related to fraud and taxpayers reportedly paid a total of over USD 1.5 billion in fraudulent schemes, with the average amount paid being USD 537. Moreover, 43% of the victims acknowledged that scammers reached them through email messages.

The top three states that have the most per capita rate of fraud reported are Colorado, Delaware and Maryland as first, second and third, respectively.

Generally, FTC discovered that people are either more willing to file complaints or they simply have more complaints now. The total amount of complaints they have received has increased by over 20% — from 1.5 million to 1.8 million in 2011 — that includes both identity theft and fraud complaints.

The following is the complete list of FTC’s top 10 consumer complaints for the year 2011:

1. Identity theft

2. Debt collection

3. Lotteries, sweepstakes, prizes

4. Catalog sales, shop-at-home

5. Lenders and Banks

6. Internet services

7. Auto-related complaints

8. Impostor scams

9. Mobile and telephone services

10. Credit protection/repair and advance-fee loans

Springhill Group - Korea`s largest bank reports

Korea`s largest bank Kookmin has had 3,000 cases of document manipulation in applications for collective loans for intermediate payment.
The bank said five people recently filed a petition to police after suffering losses from manipulation of related documents by bank staff, and has launched an investigation into similar cases.
According to the Financial Supervisory Service and the bank, Kookmin probed between the end of last month and Aug. 10 manipulation cases on 200,000 collective loans for intermediate payment on 850 reconstruction and redevelopment apartment sites, and discovered more than 3,000 fraud cases.

According to the bank`s findings, most cases involved employee manipulation of the expiration date of collective loans for intermediate payment. In the past, three years of maturity have typically been written for collective loans for intermediate payment regardless of when the borrower would move to the house. If the bank`s headquarters reduced the time to 26 or 27 months, however, bank employees would scrape out the number and put in three years again.

If the lending period is shorter than the date written in the contract, the borrower would be pressured for repayment. Collective loans for intermediate payment are shifted to lending with home collateral. So a person can move into a house before the lending maturity expires, but failure to move in within the time frame would mean he or she must make the intermediate payment because it is not shifted to a home equity loan.
Since the number of manipulation cases was bigger than expected, a massive filing of lawsuits is likely. Fraud was considerable in cases of apartments that people had signed contracts on, an area that has seen many conflicts between builders and banks.
A financial regulatory source said, "Document manipulation cases, if identified, will raise the number of lawsuits by residents."