By Greg Marsillo
In December 2006, DISB received a complaint regarding an advance fee loan program allegedly located in Washington, DC The complainant had been contacted by phone and told he was approved for a $5,000 personal loan, which could be processed after receipt of a $500 advance fee. Fraud investigator Annette Beresford of DISB’s Enforcement and Investigation Bureau began a search of Consumer Sentinel’s database, which collects consumer complaints, and is operated by the US Federal Trade Commission, using the name of the loan company. She identified 20 additional complaints filed against the company. Further queries on the database by Beresford, using phone numbers reported by victims, identified seven additional company names that the loan company had used, along with additional telephone numbers.
A final set of queries on Consumer Sentinel’s databases was conducted, using all aliases for the loan company and all phone numbers reported by the victims, which resulted in a pool of more than 800 victims with more than $650,000 in losses. Victim reports filed in Consumer Sentinel’s database also included names of people who received the advance fees wired by victims. This information was run against public records, and revealed the identities of conspirators in the scheme. These suspects were subsequently interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The information from these interviews led to additional findings about multiple levels in the advance fee scheme and resulted in the arrest and prosecution of at least one of the scheme coordinators by a US Attorney’s Office on another state. Results of the prosecution are currently sealed due to ongoing investigative activity by the FBI.
Access to this wealth of information provided by Consumer Sentinel’s database was crucial to the development of this multi-jurisdictional, nationwide, loan scheme. Consumer Sentinel’s reports made it possible to transform a single victim’s $500 loss, to a case with hundreds of victims and losses in excess of half a million dollars. In other words, Consumer Sentinel’s database made the difference between a complaint, which would have been filed in archives for lack of federal prosecutive interest, to one that was prosecuted successfully by the US Department of Justice.
Although only regulators and law enforcement have access to this Consumer Sentinel database, anyone can file a complaint on the FTC website at ftc.gov under the heading Consumer Protection.
Gregory W. Marsillo is the assistant director for DISB’s Enforcement and Investigation Bureau. For more information, call (202) 727-8000.