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Date
Your Street Address
Your City, State Zip
Senator/Congressman
United States Senate/House
Office Building
Washington, DC
Dear Sir:
I am writing this letter at the
request of the fraud victims' advocacy organizations, Citizens United to
Find Fugitives (CUFF) and Fraudaid.com, to ask that you work to eliminate two major impediments to
fraud prosecution - the unwillingness of federal agencies to
investigate low dollar fraud and the lack of funds in local law
enforcement budgets for fugitive extradition.
While low dollar fraud prosecution is shamefully rare in all law enforcement
jurisdictions, I am asking that you make changes where you have the
power to do so - within the federal agencies entrusted to prosecute
Internet, mail and wire fraud. Currently, the financial
"threshold" set for fraud prosecution by the USPS, FTC and FBI is
so high that it is creating an easy lifestyle of fraud for con
artists who remain within this "safe zone" where the feds
won't prosecute and where local authorities often can't.
As
it now stands, if a "low dollar" Internet fraud victim in one
state
contacts the police in another state where the accused thief lives, the local authorities
often refuse to file charges because of their limited budgets and the
complexity of prosecuting interstate fraud. But, even if a county prosecutor
is willing to file charges, the victims rarely see justice when the
defendant flees the jurisdiction because funding for fugitive
extradition is also limited. This deficiency is summarized
by the comments of one county prosecutor who
told the investigating detective that he wasn't going to spend local
taxpayers' dollars to extradite an Internet thief who had fled the state when
none of his multiple victims even lived in the state.
In support
of Attorney General John Ashcroft's announcement on November 20, 2003
that "It is a top federal law enforcement priority to stop crime on
the Internet," I am asking that you work to change
this deplorable situation by
creating a national extradition fund that all law
enforcement agencies could access in order to return fugitives
with warrants to their jurisdictions. As it is now, prosecutors who refuse to extradite fugitives may save the tax dollars of their own
communities but they are inevitably passing the costs of the fugitives'
future crimes on to other communities. Prompt prosecution and
incarceration for financial crimes is the only way all communities can
be protected from serial scam and con artists. And this is only going to happen with the
expenditure of federal money to guarantee that all fugitives will be
promptly extradited when they are located.
I am also asking that you
lower to a minimum the monetary thresholds currently set by the federal agencies
that prosecute fraud. Although the federal government has historically handled only fraud
involving high dollar
interstate transactions, the Internet has created an urgency to revise this
standard. Many Internet scam artists steal from multiple victims in multiple
states. While the loss for one victim of a single thief may be
well below the federal threshold, the aggregate loss for multiple
victims of this same thief is often far above it. But by the time
the scam artist is finally charged and convicted for some of these
crimes, most of the previous victims aren't even known to the
prosecutor and they never see justice. Since the FBI's Internet Fraud
Complaint Center alone received 58,000 fraud complaints in the first nine
months of 2003 compared to 48,252 for all of 2002 and since the 2002
total was three times that of 2001, it is apparent that these crimes are
accelerating exponentially.
Additionally, I am asking that one single agency
be designated to handle ALL Internet fraud complaints. This agency
should
receive all fraud complaints just as a 911 dispatcher receives all emergency
calls. The complaints would then be entered into a central complaint
database, similar to the FTC's globally-shared database, Consumer
Sentinel, and assigned to the appropriate agency for investigation. The database
would be accessible to all federal agencies involved in fraud investigation which
would
make it easier for investigators to recognize multiple complaints
against a single individual or company. When fraud is
verified by federal investigators, prosecution could occur on the
federal level or at the local level with financial support from the
federal government.
With your help, we can change these deficiencies in our criminal justice
system so that criminals as well as the general public will be assured
that fraud is taken very seriously by law enforcement. And the private sector will also benefit as insurance
claims for fraud are reduced and the money that would have been lost
($200 million in 2003) by
future victims of the thieves can instead be spent on consumer goods and
taxes.
Sincerely,
Your Name
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