Organized Crime In The New Millennium

Interpol maintains a database of 40 million lost and stolen travel documents from 157
countries which it makes available to governments and the public, including airlines and
hotels. The Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database however is little used.
Big News Network which is based in the UAE, observed that Interpol Secretary General
Ronald K. Noble told a forum in Abu Dhabi the previous month this was the case. "The
bad news is that, despite being incredibly cost effective and deployable to virtually
anywhere in the world, only a handful of countries are systematically using SLTD to
screen travelers. The result is a major gap in our global security apparatus that is left
vulnerable to exploitation by criminals and terrorists," Noble is quoted as saying.
Australia
In Australia, each state has enacted laws that deal with different aspects of identity or
fraud issues. Some states have now amended relevant criminal laws to reflect crimes of
identity theft, such as the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA), Crimes
Amendment (Fraud, Identity and Forgery Offences) Act 2009 and also in Queensland
under the Criminal Code 1899 (QLD). Other states and territories are in states of
development in respect of regulatory frameworks relating to identity theft such as
Western Australia in respect of Criminal Code Amendment (Identity Crime) Bill 2009.
At the Commonwealth level, under the Criminal Code Amendment (Theft, Fraud,
Bribery & Related Offences) Act 2000 which amended certain provisions within the
Criminal Code Act 1995,
Between 2014 and 2015, in Australia there were 133,921 fraud and deception offences,
an increase of 6% from previous year. The total cost reported by the Attorney General
Department was:
Total Costs
Fraud Category Cost Per Incident Total Direct Cost
Commonwealth fraud $2,111 $353,866,740
Personal fraud $400 $656,550,506
Police recorded fraud $4,412 per unrecorded incident
$27,981 per recorded incident
$3,260,141,049
There are also high indirect costs associated as a direct result of an incident. For
example, the total indirect costs for police recorded fraud is $5,774,081.
135.1 General Dishonesty
(3) A person is guilty of an offence if a) the person does anything with the
intention of dishonestly causing a loss to another person; and b) the other person
is a Commonwealth entity. Penalty: Imprisonment for 5 years.
Likewise, each state has enacted their own privacy laws to prevent misuse of personal
information and data. The Commonwealth Privacy Act is applicable only to
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