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Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Fraud Squad increases manpower to fight fraud

by

Rishard Khan
1986 days ago
20190918

With over 600 re­ports of au­to­mat­ed bank­ing ma­chine (ABM) fraud be­ing made this year, the TTPS’ Fraud Squad is em­ploy­ing new tac­tics to quell the is­sue which has al­ready led to mil­lions of dol­lars in loss­es.

Ac­cord­ing to Ag. Supt of the Fraud Squad Curt Si­mon, at the week­ly me­dia brief­ing on Wednes­day, re­vealed that “this year we have 662 re­ports of ABM card fraud and it’s amount­ing to over 4.5 mil­lion dol­lars in loss­es,” a fig­ure sim­i­lar to last year’s re­port­ed cas­es, he said.

Aside from ABM fraud, they have re­ceived some 555 re­ports of oth­er in­ci­dents of fraud and, to date, have charged 59 peo­ple for the felony.

“While it may look like a small amount of in­di­vid­u­als charged, the ac­tu­al amount of cas­es laid though amounts to 140 cas­es laid. So you’d find that when we de­tect a fraud of­fence and ar­rest an in­di­vid­ual, the in­di­vid­ual would tend to be re­spon­si­ble not on­ly for an in­di­vid­ual in­ci­dent,” he said.

In light of the stag­ger­ing re­ports of ABM fraud, the Fraud Squad has set up a task force geared to­ward com­bat­ing it.

“This is a very strate­gic move - we think - in try­ing to com­bat crime. Just up to last night we made a sig­nif­i­cant ar­rest I would say. We ar­rest­ed eight per­sons, sev­en of them be­ing Venezue­lans and one lo­cal...these per­sons were ob­served tam­per­ing with an ABM ma­chine in a pop­u­lar mall in East Trinidad. From the ar­rest and search of premis­es and so on, we were able to get a num­ber of what ap­pears to be coun­ter­feit ABM cards amount­ing to over 100 of them,” he said.

In ad­di­tion to this, the Fraud Squad has al­so brought on 17 of­fi­cers to join them in fight­ing crime.

“They have un­der­gone a pe­ri­od of about three months - class­room and prac­ti­cal. As we speak they are in a class­room ses­sion and we are prepar­ing the of­fi­cers to join in the pre­ven­tion and the fight against crime, main­ly of course in our are­na - fraud,” he said.

In ad­di­tion to these, Si­mon said they al­so con­duct train­ing with stake­hold­ers who may be sus­cep­ti­ble to fraud such as in­sur­ance com­pa­nies; teach­ing them how to iden­ti­fy and com­bat cas­es of fraud.

Si­mon ad­vised mem­bers of the pub­lic to ex­er­cise due dili­gence to re­duce the chances of be­com­ing vic­tims of ABM fraud. He en­cour­aged cit­i­zens to en­gage in prac­tices such as ob­serv­ing their sur­round­ings, not let­ting their cards out of their sight and ab­stain­ing from re­veal­ing per­son­al in­for­ma­tion such as card pins to any­one - whether in per­son or on­line.


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