The new anti-fraud government hotline (not toll-free, it should be noted)
– By Scott Sayare –
PARIS — Earlier this month, Interior Minister Michelle Alliot-Marie launched an anti-scam reporting service and public information campaign, aimed largely at what the French government and press (France 2, Le Figaro) are calling an “explosion” in internet fraud in 2008.
According to the Interior Ministry, reports of scams and confidence schemes jumped more than 20 percent in 2008 over the previous year’s levels, when the OCLCTIC (must there be an acronym for everything?), the French goverment agency charged with combatting technology and communications crime, received about 4500 complaints of internet fraud.
This puts this past year’s rate of complaint at about eight per hundred thousand Frenchmen. In the US in 2007, the last year for which statistics are available from the government’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, citizens made about 207,000 such complaints, for a rate of 67 per hundred thousand, or eight times the French rate. And this represented a modest decrease in reported internet scams in the US.
So why all the hype in France? Or, perhaps, why don’t we talk about this in the US, where the problem appears to be at least an order of magnitude more serious?
I submit that it has something to do with French cultural expectations about government intervention in the lives of the citizen. The French expect that the government will oversee every aspect of their consumptive lives: their telephone and internet connections (until recently, all through France Télécom, the nationalized phone company), their salaries (no more than 35 hours a week), their heating and electric bills (EDF, the national electrical provider), their television-watching (France 2, 3, 4, 5 and Ô) and almost anything else one can imagine.
Clearly, such is not the case in the US, where Caveat emptor remains perhaps the guiding dictum for the consumer; if you get defrauded, it’s probably mostly your fault.
But the French, when taken by scams somehow overlooked by their ever-watchful (and ever-intrusively-present) government agencies, feel betrayed; why put up with constant government intervention if it doesn’t guarantee the legitimacy of every financial transaction?
One gets the sense, as well, that the technological revolution that has occurred in the US over the past two decades has not quite reached the same level in France. Or rather, the French remain a few years behind. Perhaps they’re waiting for the government to tell them that it really is safe to use the internet. Or perhaps the French penchant for traditionalism extends to a mistrust of technology, and the rise in internet fraud only confirms some deeply held suspicions (though everyone here seems to have a flashy mobile phone of some sort, for example, even the elderly).
Whatever it is, though, there is something distinctly French about the notion that the current state of affairs represents a crisis.
1 Comment
01.19.2009 at 19:50
Hell yeah… By now you should know that the French just LOVE to complain about everything, without doing a thing to change anything by themselves.