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b"With Blake Ellis & Melanie Hicken, Investigative Reporters, CNN\\xa0
Scams come knocking from all sides: They arrive in the mail; they show up in our inbox; they call us on the phone, and they particularly target the elderly.
Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken of CNN Money recently broke a story about a global mail scheme that turned out to be one of the largest in the history of the Department of Justice.
Impaired cognition, desperation, or naivete\\u2019 often drive older people to fall prey to acts of fraud which can leave them financially devastated. The sophistication behind these come-ons is startling and quite frightening\\u2014they offer big prizes, answers to life\\u2019s questions from \\u201cbeyond\\u201d, and they always require you to send money, sometimes even a small sum, to get to that pot of gold. Of course, that pot of gold never appears.
While investigating acts of consumer fraud, Blake and Melanie were scanning through a pile of junk mail and came upon a letter from a French psychic named Maria Duval, which led to their uncovering a massive scam. They initially discovered that over the course of almost 20 years, the Maria Duval scam had bilked more than two hundred million dollars from the unsuspecting in just the United States and Canada alone. Was there actually a Maria Duval? They had to go all the way to France to find out that she did, indeed, exist but was now too elderly and ill to even be interviewed. Information from her son revealed that, although she had gotten some money herself, she was just another victim of the scammers who used her name and picture to their advantage.
Whether it\\u2019s the Nigerian minister scam, the winning Sweepstakes in the mail, a financial windfall scam, or Maria Duval divining a prophecy, what all these schemes have in common is money being sent and checks being cashed. Following the money trail is what led to the stunning realization that one company in Canada called PacNet was responsible for processing payments for multiple fraudulent schemes. Maria Duval was only the tip of the iceberg.
When contacted and questioned by Melanie and Blake, the officials at PacNet claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing and that they too were victims of the scammers. Not only were they processing all these payments, they also obscured where the money was going and engaged in a whole host of shady and nefarious evasions. Even after receiving stern warnings from the government, PacNet denied culpability and continued to operate as usual.
But the government was just as persistent and the U.S. Treasury eventually took the unprecedented action of adding PacNet to a blacklist along with some of the most dangerous and deadly criminal cartels, drug dealers, and murderers. PacNet is the first of its kind to be on this list.
Now that it's designated as a transnational criminal organization, U.S. companies and individuals are banned from doing business with PacNet, so it's cut out of the U.S. financial system entirely.\\xa0 It can no longer prey on victims here in the U.S. and will be unable to do business with many international banks as well.
It's going to be very hard for PacNet to continue doing business anywhere, and that\\u2019s a very good thing. These scams are taking away the only money many of the elderly have. The sad part is that, like the Whack-A-Mole theory, you can punch one down, but another will pop up somewhere else. Thanks to the dedication and persistence of people like Melanie Hicken and Blake Ellis who go after these deplorable scammers, many of their plots will be foiled.\\xa0 You and I can do our part by looking after our elderly parents and neighbors.
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