Financial Investment Frauds: Victimological View
Purpose:
The main purpose of the article is to rise attention of the public about the scope of investment frauds, their characteristics and the effects on the victims; to explain the contexts of victimsʹ lives and how they interplay with making someone more or less vulnerable becoming the victim of investment fraud. The goal is also to present some case studies to show the signs of the possible financial fraud.
Design/Methods/Approach:
The article combines two theoretical fields: victimology and financial crime. In the paper, methods of descriptive and comparative analysis and synthesis were used. Scientific method of synthesis based on a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning is used for drawing conclusions. In reviewing victimology researches, the emphasis was on researches dealing with victims of financial crime, specifically the victims of investment fraud.
Findings:
Financial frauds, and more specifically investment frauds, are the problem of the society and the problem of the individual. Financial crimes affect thousands of people every year, yet very little is known about the experiences. Such experience deeply incises into the lives of individuals and has extremely negative impact on their lives due to the victimization - not only in the material sense (material losses) but also highly negative emotional, psychological and health impacts. The article brings the most common types of investment frauds, characteristics of the victims and their contexts of lives which have the major impact on the fact that one became the victim of the investment fraud. Therefore, the context within which the investment scam happens is featured. The article concludes with a review of some of the most obvious and most common signs, on which you can suspect that the opportunity presented is an investment scam and not a real investment opportunity.
Research Limitations / Implications:
The sources and the researches of the victims of investment fraud and other financial crime are rarer because of the fact, that more attention in given by both, the criminologists and the general public, to the victims of classic („violent“) crime compared to the attention given to the victims of white collar crime.
Originality/Value:
The topic is relevant because of the fact, that recently more and more recruiting actions by fraudsters have taken place on the web sites and via other channels of communication (i.e. spam, cold phone calls, organization of free seminars and sales promotions), all leading the potential victims to making decisions in investing their savings into the financial opportunities, of which some of them may just be financial scams.
Our aim is to inform the public about the scope of these phenomena, to give the outline about the process of leading the investor into the financial fraud (grooming), to present the consequences of the fact that one is become the victim of financial fraud and the impact on his or her life.
UDC: 343.72
Keywords: investments, frauds, scams, financial crimes, victims