industry in Australia generates a total revenue exceeding $3.36 Billion per annum. That’s no misprint, over three and a quarter billion dollars every year nationwide is being spent on the school formal experience. $192 Million of that alone is just in the Sydney metropolitan region.
That amount of cash being moved around would make any industry a tasty prospect for any form of organised crime, and make no mistake; we are talking about organised crime. There were multiple people involved, using resources spread over several states, utilising many different physical and technical resources, conspiring together for the
Many readers will remember only a couple of years back when headline news was filled with stories of teenagers having been ripped-off by school formal scammers and con artists.
All of society was aghast, not just the school community, at the lengths to which scammers were going in order to prey on unsuspecting teens, and in many cases, even their parents and teachers became victims.
In this exposé, with information not made available to the media at large, Prom Magazine brings you the exclusive and in depth look inside the scammers operation and reveals the tricks, cleverly devised and expertly executed, that managed to destroy the dreams and wishes of teens all over the country.
For legal reasons, we are unable to name names of either the individuals or companies involved, however, what we can reveal is how they did it, how many people they did it to and how you can best guard yourself against becoming a victim.
To first paint the picture of the school formal industry is important, economically, in order to understand why these con artists chose to set up their operation as they did. Surveys conducted from 2006 to 2011 demonstrated that the school formal industry in Australia generates a total revenue exceeding $3.36 Billion per annum. That’s no misprint, over three and a quarter billion dollars every year nationwide. $192 Million of that alone is just in the Sydney metropolitan region.
specific purpose of defrauding people. This was no tin-pot operation. This was big business.
Of course most people reading about this in the newspapers, or watching it on TV when the story broke, could understandably have thought that this was something new and that it was shut down almost as quickly as it had started up. What the media didn’t report is that this operation had been running successfully for as long as seven (7) years and had managed to stay under the radar of the authorities and the media for that long while it ticked over literally millions of dollars.
The main players in the scam based themselves in Sydney, then systematically dispatched or recruited satellite crews to open operations in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, The Gold Coast, and a large multi-level operation involving other scams for other industries based in Adelaide.
The operation was very sophisticated, involving marketing companies, web design companies, suppliers of things like beauty products and nightclub entertainment. Some of these were real and legitimate businesses who later discovered that they had also themselves been scammed, while others were bogus entities that were set up just to make this operation look credible.
The scale of this thing was astonishing.
Formal
Scammers
Their Tricks Revealed
They're out there. Waiting to get their hands on your money and ruin your dream formal. They don't care who you are, or how hard you've worked to get to formal night. They only care about your cash.
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"over three and a quarter billion dollars every year nationwide is being spent on the school formal experience"