Jamaica announced a new government task force Thursday to fight proliferating lottery scams that have made the Caribbean country a center for international telemarketing fraud.
The Jamaican and U.S. governments already have a 3-year-old joint task force that has been dealing with the schemes, which mainly target elderly Americans, but the problem has gotten worse. Three years and roughly 100 arrests later, the United States-Jamaica task force set up to combat the burgeoning lottery scam appears to have failed spectacularly.
The most conservative estimates put the yearly take from Jamaican scams at $300 million, up from about $30 million in 2009. Montego Bay has earned the reputation for being the epicentre of the lottery scam, and complaints from US victims rose from under 2,000 in 2007 to about 30,000 last year.
Police in Jamaica say there are very visible signs of the fraud-spawned riches in the hot spot for the gangs, St. James parish, where a growing number of teenagers and twentysomethings from modest backgrounds are living very well without any obvious source of income.
The scams started taking off in Jamaica roughly five years ago, at about the same time the island became a regional leader in call centers dedicated to customer service. Since 2006, many of the legitimate call centers have been based in Montego Bay, and that is where many of the fraud rings have popped up.