Fraud - From Here to the Moon
Hi. I'm Leslie Kim, Editor of the John Cooke Fraud Reports and
FightFraudAmerica.com, and I have a confession to make.
One day I was addressing an audience of about 600. I'd been given
the morning time slot, just after breakfast, and every one of those
six hundred people would have really preferred to crawl back into
bed and go to sleep. So I did a bad thing. I threw out a very visual
example of the COST of fraud to our society in a blatant attempt to
wake them up.
"If you add up every dollar that our economy spends on fraud for one
year, and lined them up end to end to end... they would stretch from
where I am standing right now, TO THE MOON AND BACK ... twenty eight
times."
Everybody woke up. Mouths hung open. And for the next hour they
listened as intently to my message as they possibly could.
So what was so bad about that?
Okay, here's the confession. I made it up. That number popped
straight out of my head.
Do I feel bad about doing such a thing? Heck no. In fact I feel that
even though the visual suggested by that lunar trip, especially 28
times, was shocking, I knew that I could support it. Let me show you
the numbers.
Let's consider some (somewhat) simple mathematics.
A dollar bill is just over 6 inches long..
There are 5280 feet in a mile.
That means that it takes 10,560 dollar bills, end to end, to stretch
a mile.
Subject to a whole lot of factors (like where you are on the Earth,
the time of year, etc.), the moon is about 238,000 miles from the
Earth.
A bit of multiplication says that this comes up to about $5 billion
dollar bills per round trip between us and the moon.
Hmmmm. 28 round trips at $5 billion each is $140 billion.
If you add up all the categories of fraud that fit within the
definition of "Gain Through Misrepresentation," my $140 billion
estimate is ... LOW!!!!!
So much for waking 600 fraud investigators up on an otherwise dreary
Monday morning. Right now I want to go bigger and better. I want to
wake all of America up.
Fight Fraud America
- Leslie