Fraud is defined as using lying, cheating and deception to gain a financial advantage.\u00a0 According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Australians reported over $851 million lost to fraud in 2020, up from $634 million in 2019. While these monetary losses are significant, there are also many wide ranging non-financial harms that result. The impact can be both devastating and life changing for victims, yet there is a shame and stigma that prevents many from talking about it.<\/p>\n
In recognition of this, QUT Centre for Justice has released a Briefing Paper Series focused on, Consumer Awareness and Protection. <\/strong>It\u00a0examines some of the categories of fraud, and how to reduce vulnerability to exploitation in multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes.\u00a0 \u00a0The QUT Centre for Justice Briefing Paper Series<\/a><\/strong> provides short, accessible accounts of topics and issues related to justice. This email is to invite you to review our\u00a0Consumer Awareness and Protection<\/strong> series. Links to the papers and some other important work in this field are below.<\/p>\n In their paper titled,\u00a0\u00a0\u201cDeveloping a\u00a0 profile of multi-level marketing consultants in Australia to support informed decisions<\/a>\u201d \u00a0Deanna Grant-Smith, Alicia Feldman, Bernd Irmer and Laura de Zwaan,\u00a0consider the demographic and psychographic characteristics, financial literacy and knowledge and previous selling and business experience of Australian MLM consultants.<\/p>\n Deanna and Laura\u2019s research into multi-level marketing schemes recently featured in The Conversation<\/a>. You can read more about Deanna\u2019s research here<\/a><\/p>\n Using data sourced from the ScamWatch Job and Employment Scam Statistics to identify trends in recruitment fraud in Australia,\u00a0Deanna Grant-Smith, and Alicia Feldman with Cassandra Cross authored a second paper in the series titled, \u201cKey Trends in Employment Scams in Australia:\u00a0 what are the gaps in knowledge about recruitment fraud?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, Cassandra Cross draws on expertise developed over many years of research into fraud, to highlight how romance fraud occurs, and the need to improve prevention for those targeted,\u00a0In \u201cA Guide to Understanding Romance Fraud<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Like Deanna, Cassandra’s work has also recently been featured in The Conversation:\u00a0\u201cFirst the \u2018love-bomb\u2019, then the \u2018financial emergency\u2019: 5 tactics of Tinder swindlers.<\/a>\u201d\u00a0You can read more about Cassandra\u2019s research here.<\/a><\/p>\n Consumer protection and financial literacy are important social justice issues. To acknowledge this QUT Centre for Justice invited leading industry experts to take part in a “Let’s Talk about Scams” panel to raise awareness and mark National Scams Awareness Week 2021.\u00a0 You can view the panel discussion here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fraud is defined as using lying, cheating and deception to gain a financial advantage.\u00a0 According to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Australians reported over $851 million lost to fraud in 2020, up from $634 million in 2019. While these monetary losses are significant, there are also many wide ranging non-financial harms that result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4341,"featured_media":4858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28809],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-briefing-paper-series"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4859,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4857\/revisions\/4859"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qut.edu.au\/crime-and-justice-research-centre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}