Inside the scam
INSIDE THE INSURANCE BOND INVESTMENT SCAM
By Amy Bainbridge and Loretta Florance, ABC News
Professor Buckland said the chance of the criminals being caught was low — even finding out which country they were from was difficult.
“This whole thing, it’s the gig economy to the extreme,” he said.
“All the hosting services are not in Australia, the weapons are out of the country, the VoIP service [to use the phone number].
“I would assume people running this would be running it at scale.
“They might have a different phone number for every person or every company they’re pretending to be … but they’re probably running multiple ones in multiple countries at the same time.”
And it’s cheap.
All up, Professor Buckland estimates the fake websites cost the scammers about $20 for each.
“These ones were all set up around about the same time,” he said. “One of them [this year], just a day or two before Tony got caught, actually.”
Scammers stole $851 million from Australian victims in 2020. Of that, $328 million was through fake investment opportunities — the most of any type of scam.
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