An Irish student has warned her fellow J1 travelers (those on summer working visas) to beware of a rental scam in the US that cost her and her friends almost $5,000. Leah Hughes (21), from Clonskeagh in Dublin, had been planning the trip of a lifetime - a summer in Los Angeles with four of her friends. The group wired $4,750 to a man claiming to own a property in Santa Monica on a reputable rental website, but he pocketed the money and left them with nothing. Leah, a journalism student from Dublin Business School, said: "Half of our accommodation money is gone. We've lost 750 euro each, which is half of what we were able to spend so we've decided we don't want to go to LA. I don't want to even think that I'm living in the same area as this guy who did this. “But we still want to go because we've paid for our flights and for our J1 visa but we're going to go to San Francisco instead. We don't have a house yet to stay in because we haven't been able to find anywhere that we can afford." Unfortunately, this kind of scam which cost Leah and her friends is common in the US. Celine Kennelly of the Irish Immigration and Pastoral Center in San Francisco said, "Our advice is, if someone asks you to wire money ahead of arriving here, don't do it. We've had this situation before and many students get scammed this way every year. We want to get the message out there to people that wiring money over to someone you don't know just isn't safe." Instead, students are urged to find a cheap hostel for the first few nights in their city of choice and use that as a base to look for accommodation when they arrive.
kylie cassidy on 27 Jul 12The insurance fraud in Changwon uncovered by the Financial Supervisory Service is both shocking and disturbing. It involved as many as 1,361 people, mostly residents of the South Gyeongsang Province city, who either posed as fake patients or exaggerated their illnesses. Collectively, they claimed 9.5 billion won from 33 insurance companies between 2007 and 2011. At the center of the scam ― the largest ever in terms of the number of people involved ― were three unconscionable hospitals in the city, which recruited fake patients systematically in cahoots with insurance brokers and solicitors. They did this to increase revenue and ease their financial distress. The main ploy used by the hospitals was to share a patient, meaning they would arrange for a patient to check in the three hospitals alternately for a different disease. For this, they faked his illnesses and prepared false documents. For close cooperation, they shared patient information among themselves. This scheme helped patients pocket more insurance money. They all purchased multiple private health insurance policies before hospitalization. On average they received some 7 million won per person. In one example, a man in his 50s was hospitalized for a total of 564 days over three years, collecting 95 million won in insurance. The Changwon case followed a similar one that took place in Taebaek last November, involving more than 400 people in the declining mining town in Gangwon Province. They got a total of 14 billion won in insurance payments. As with the Changwon scam, three financially distressed hospitals in the city played a central role. The two cases suggest that insurance fraud is a fairly common occurrence in Korea. According to the FSS, the number of insurance-related crimes has surged in recent years. Last year alone, more than 70,000 people were caught for insurance scams, with the amount of false claims they filed reaching 423 billion won. Yet the figure represented just the tip of the
