Writing

1. Translate into Ukrainian.

The procedure is the following: the owner of goods is responsible for the payment of duty. However, the destination of some goods requires the freight forwarder to become responsible for the payment of customs duty instead of the owner. These goods are classified as Community Transit ones. All imported goods for consumption within the European Union are subject to customs duty. However, the EU does not require the payment of customs duty when the goods are classified as Community Transit goods. Since they ordinarily originate outside the EU but always pass through one or several member states. The system allows a consignor to transport goods without repeatedly having to pay and reclaim customs duty with every country.

When goods are transported, the EU requires a guarantee to cover any potential customs duty loss in cases where goods are thought to have been consumed within a member state country not designated as the final destination. The freight forwarder provides the guarantee because he has legal possession of the goods and is responsible for duty and taxes.

2. Express your opinion on the following statement: ‘Any economic crime is financial crime too’.

SECTION 3:

Fraud in consumer sphere

Before you read

Discuss these questions:

1. What are consumers?

2. What services may we refer to consumer sphere?

Key vocabulary:

to be swindled, to be victimized, to convince, inventories, sub distributorships, recruit, investment, misappropriation, to trap, solicit donations, slick advertising, to misrepresent, utility

Read and translate the following texts :

Consumer Fraud

The act of deceiving unsuspecting consumers can be easily committed, difficult to prosecute and very profitable for the criminals. Whether the financial loss is large or small, no one likes to be swindled or conned. The unwary can be easily victimized by criminals, unawaring that they have been defrauded or being too ashamed when they understand that they have became a victim of fraud.

The best way to reduce fraud is through increased awareness. The greatest enemy to the perpetrator of fraud is the informed consumer. Fraud can take many different forms, as the only limit to the con-artistт0s is their creativity and imagination. The following descriptions do not provide an exhaustive list of fraudulent practices, but serve to provide an indication of some of the more common consumer fraud schemes.

Pyramid or Chain Referral Schemes

A pyramid or chain referral scheme is a marketing program based on convincing people to buy the right to sell others a particular product or to market a product line. Promoters select product and sell large or overpriced inventories to «distributors», with the added incentive of allowing the distributors to sell sub distributorships. The profit is earned primarily by investors who enlist new recruits and they enroll more recruits. In order to recoup the initial investment, new recruits are encouraged to sell new distributorships and there is little real concern given to selling the product or service to the public.

The attraction of the pyramid scheme is that it offers an unusually high rate of return to the initial investment. Investors are usually assured of getting a full return of their money if they hire two or more «new» investors to make an investment. The new investors must then get two or more new investors and so it continues on and on...

Promoters fail to tell or deliberately conceal that profit from this system becomes mathematically impossible for other except the initiators of the scheme. Similar pyramid schemes are also appearing in the Internet.