In the last few posts, I have discussed elderly fraud, however there is probably not one aspect of society that is not touched by fraud. Minorities just like the elderly are seen as a target for fraud because of their inexperience with local markets, and their lack of language skills allows them to be manipulated more easily. “A recent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) survey found that 11.2% of the US population and over 14% of the US Latino population are victims of consumer fraud.” These numbers of staggering nationally and even more so for Hispanics, which tend to be susceptible to vocational school scams, money-wiring fraud, used car scams, and scams promising legal status. Some of these scams are moderately public, such as an ad I once saw as a pop up add claiming that I had won a green card. Most of us would probably know this is a pop up whose content is pure fabrication but others with less experience on how the system works could see themselves caught in such frauds.
According to research conducted in Georgia by the International Journal of Consumer studies many frauds committed against Hispanics are affinity frauds, which are frauds committed by someone pretending to befriend the victim and who speaks their language, other frauds are fueled by lack of knowledge such as notary publics claiming to do services they cannot perform, and bail bonds men taking advantage of their clients. In order to prevent Latinos from facing such fraud it is important to educate them on financial literacy and the working of he society they now live in as well as having outlets for them to report fraud in order to uproot it.
Marlowe, J. and Atiles, J. H. (2005), Consumer fraud and Latino immigrant consumers in the United States. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 29: 391–400. doi: 10.1111/j.1470-6431.2005.00463.x
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