"Emergency" Schemes - United States and Beyond

On July 13, ABC News posted an article and video of a "Nightline" story about so-called "stranded traveler" schemes, in which scammers hack into someone's email account and proceed to email that person's contacts that the accountholder has been "stranded" (e.g., mugged or arrested) in a foreign country and urgently needs money.  The Nightline segment features Charles Pavelites, an FBI Special Agent with the Internet Crime Complaint Center.

This report is simply one of the latest in a spate of recent media and law enforcement reports about the growing variety of "emergency" or "grandparent" scams in a growing number of countries such as Canada, Haiti, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  In Japan, where the "grandparent" scam came to light a number of years ago as the "It's me" scam, on January 20 the Tokyo Reporter (a ready guide to the dark side of life in Japan) posted an article stating that the National Police Agency had tracked a 34 percent increase in "It's me" fraud from 2010 to 2011, involving a reported $138 million in losses.  The Japan Times published an article on April 27 reporting that an "It's me" scammer has even written a book (in Japanese) about his experience in such frauds.