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I am a real crime victim

I am a victim of a crime which costs Canadians hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

I am responding to your request (The News, Dec. 6) to hear from victims of crime.

I am a victim of a crime which costs Canadians hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The crime is “attempted fraud” (S. 380) which carries a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment.

I am victimized almost every day in the form of e-mail messages which offer money, diamonds or real estate. All I have to do is provide the sender with my banking information, and untold riches await me.

I don’t report these crimes to the police because I believe, like many Canadians, that the crimes are “too minor” and “the police can’t do anything about them anyway.”

But technically, I’m a victim of crime almost every day, and I’ve chosen not to report them. We can only conclude that there really are “millions of unreported crimes” as the apologists for Stephen Harper’s crime control policies like to tell us.

John Anderson, PhD, Chair, Criminology Department, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo