Aceyducey,
You said, "MF35,
If the police sent a few undercover operatives into some of these real estate seminars they would quickly find some highly illegal practices.
With no disrespect, but bearing in mind how little attention seems to be paid officially to this area, are the police interested in preventing these crimes - which affect thousands?
Yes I understand limited resources and all that....however this IS organised crime on a large scale & would be VERY good press for the force!
Cheers,
Aceyducey"
No offence taken at all. My reaction would be the same from the outside. If only it were that easy. The problem is that fraud offences are extremely difficult to prove. For it to be a criminal offence you have to be able to prove some sort of criminal intent to defraud is behind the action. Although it is to me obviously unethical how can we prove the criminal intent to defraud. To give bad advice is not fraud. To charge to much for a service is not fraud. If you're business fails and you can't pay up that's not fraud. If you have a gripe with the quality of service etc that's not fraud. (there are exceptions to this eg. failing to pay for meals at restaurants and taxi fares).
Basically unless you can prove that they either never intended to provide the service or goods you paid for, or on the flip side they never had the money to purchase the service or goods you offer, and entered the agreement therefore with intent to defraud you, there is not even a sniff of a criminal charge. It's a civil dispute.
There are some additional offences that relate to how company directors conduct business and deal with their moneys. Eg - Failing to properly account for monies. These are largely enforced by Fair Trading and ASIC etc. You need a financial background to properly investigate alot of these offences. The main criminal offences that apply to general fraud related behaviour are;
- Obtaining a benefit by deception - which requires exactly that. That you can prove the defendant deliberately deceived the victim in order to obtain the benefit. To prove this you basically need to be able to prove they have lied or knowingly presented false info in order to obtain the financial benefit. This is also treated as a relatively minor offence by the courts. People don't go to Gaol for this unless it's huge amounts of money or they have done it 50 times or something.
- Using a False Instrument - is where they use a document that has been forged or falsified in some way to cause the victim "to do or not to do something to that person's prejudice". This is a good offence and is treated slightly more seriously but you must be able to prove that they used a "false instrument".
The list goes on to such offences like Misappropriation of money, Fraudulant appropriation of property etc.
The key factor is that you must be able to show the defendant was deliberately deceiving someone to obtain the financial advatage. No matter how eroneous their judgement, if they believed what they were telling you was correct (more to the point if you can't prove they didn't) then if you agree and lose a fortune it is a civil dispute.
That will hopefully give you a basic idea of why alot of these things don't come under the crimnal scope. It is however very basic and intended to convey a point. It doesn't cover all situations or all possible offences. I do deal with fraud offences but work at a Local Area Command so I deal with everything else as well. I am not a specialist in Fraud Investigation.
On top of this you have the resources issue you raised. At my command (eastern suburbs area of Sydney) we cover a large area and currently have 11 Detectives. Put simply the police cannot investigate every reported offence and so a priortising takes place. We were recently top of the state for armed robberies, and constantly deal with other violent serious offences such as suspicious deaths, homicide, gang related extortions etc as well as clear cut criminal theft and fraud matters. In my opion we don't even have the resources to adequately cover violent and clearly criminal activity let alone activity which is considered civil or border line criminal as well.
So when offences come in that are not clearly criminal fraud matters (unless they involve very large amounts of money) we are unlikely to investigate them at all.
This said I believe some activities currently undertaken in the Real Estate industry such as undisclosed vendor bidding or phantom competition on sale by negotiation could meet the criteria for "Benefit by deception" fraud offences if you can prove it. It's proving it that is the hard thing. This area is also generally considered the teritory of Fair Trading and if they felt a need for police involvement they would call for our assistance.
This proposed legislation I've heard about for Auctions where people have to produce ID and hold a paddle will have little effect in my opinion. It's to easy to explain away. The simple response from a dummy bidder will be, "Went to high for me". The only way you will catch these people out (and this includes people who rort on the seminar circuit etc) is if you have undercover police inside to give you your proof of their intent to deceive. Given undercover police aren't available for anything much outside murders and serious drug matters I don't like the chances. If the government wanted to devote three or four times the current budget then maybe. But that wont happen so I'd be educating myself and worrying about avoiding the drama as I would not expect that the government will come to the rescue in a hurry.
So in short if someone sells you a crap service or product your looking at dealing with the industry watch dogs, Fair Trading etc.
It's a very complicated issue that leads into government and judicial attitudes and policy. Not stuff I intend to get into here.
Good luck and keep your eyes open for rip off merchants.
MF
