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| Gems & Jewelry |
Swindler’s List
Carol Besler
05/03/2004
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A Painful Aftermath
It almost always comes as a
shock to us to learn we have allowed ourselves to be victimized. “Most people
never get past denial,” says Corporal Catherine McCrory, who pursues gemstone
scam artists from the RCMP’s Commercial Crime Section near Toronto. “I once
called a victim who was the president of a successful company to tell him he was
on the sucker list. He thought I was putting him on. In the minds of these
victims, if someone has perpetrated a fraud against them, they can just sue,”
she says. “You can’t sue these guys. First you would have to find them. Then you
would have to find the assets. It never happens.”
Some victims, ashamed of
their folly, stash the gems in a safe deposit box and never tell anyone. Their
heirs discover the collections and think they have hit the jackpot. They contact
the phony company on the documentation, hoping to liquidate them, and the fraud
starts all over again.
“One of the victims in the Oxbow case lost all his
money, his wife left him, and he became dependent on his children, who wanted to
institutionalize him, believing he had lost control of his faculties,” says
McCrory. Many of the victims, she says, are successful business owners,
accustomed to making their own decisions, and they take it the hardest. “They
think, ‘I’ve gotten this far in life only to be taken in by this con.’”
Laura Brown, a victim/witness coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Seattle, counsels victims of financial crimes and has observed that people who
have a lot of knowledge in a particular field can develop a general sense of
authority, and so hesitate to appear as if they do not understand something.
This leads them to refrain from asking a lot of questions, something the scripts
feed into with the challenge: “Do you follow me?”
True investment-grade gems
do not come into the hands of brokers this way, nor would anyone need to sell
them by phone. In Christie’s last jewelry sale, a sapphire fetched $95,600 and
an emerald went for $28,000. Both were rare stones. The sapphire was a
9.68-carat stone of an unusual magenta color—probably one-of-a-kind. The best
way to protect ourselves against these types of criminals is to realize that
gems with any real investment value are always handled by legitimate houses like
Christie’s, and never offered over the phone.
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