With the advent of technology in the banking and financial sectors, scams have wormed themselves up to be the major undesirable consequence of the technological revolution. Phishing and duping are some of the crimes that have seen a drastic increase. However, there is one more type of organised crime in the techno-banking sector that is fast rising up the ranks in terms of notoriety – that of the asset recovery firms and companies making tall claims of recovering the stolen money and in turn stealing more money from the customer without any accountability. In such cases, it becomes important to identify the potential scam before it dupes the aggrieved customer off even more amount of money.
A good way of avoiding the crime committed by these asset recovery companies is to learn the mechanism by which such companies function on a daily basis. A large chunk of their functioning rests on the information obtained by the companies about the aggrieved customers and their financial losses. Based on this information, the affected parties are then called up and promised the restoration of their money in exchange for more sums of money to be paid by the customer to these companies. Some companies, functioning in a more brazen manner, take the money altogether and then disappear, leaving no obvious traces connecting the crime to themselves and their proprietors. Others committing a comparatively milder quantum of the offence may charge the customer for the services which are available to them free of cost – including reporting to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Elsewhere, the companies may also try to pull over wool in front of the customer’s eyes by filing fraudulent claims on their behalf, thereby further endangering their cases without their knowledge, for a hefty sum of money.
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