Chicago’s criminals are learning more lucrative tricks

Visitors to Chicago often worry about gun crime. The president certainly does—on August 25th, he called the city “a disaster” and a “killing field” as he threatened to send in National Guard troops. This year however violence is dramatically down. Robberies have fallen a third on last year. The city is on track for its lowest murder rate in more than a decade. Tourist spots have in any case always been largely safe: violence is concentrated in a few rough neighbourhoods. Yet sadly that does not mean there is no risk of visitors becoming victims of crime. It just probably won’t be committed with a gun. When it comes to street theft in Chicago these days, the clipboard is mightier than the Glock 9.

At the end of August The Economist witnessed a common new crime in progress on Michigan Avenue, opposite the Art Institute, the city’s most impressive tourist attraction. At around 11am, three people got out of a car with a small folding table, which they covered with a cloth branded with the logo of the charity Amnesty International. On this, they laid out a few leaflets. The three wore laminated ID cards and carried iPads and clipboards to collect personal details of donors. Within a few minutes, they were approaching passers-by, soliciting for modest donations of $10 to $20 by credit card.

The problem is that the workers were not with Amnesty International at all. Asked for their city soliciting licence, which charities require to collect money on Chicago streets, the group produced instead a screenshot of a letter on a phone which was not a city licence. By checking the minutes of city council finance committee meetings, where licences are approved, it became apparent that Amnesty has not been issued one in over a year. The charity itself says that it had no workers on Chicago’s streets that day.

It is hard to be sure of exactly the scam that the group on Michigan Avenue were working. But a new type of in-person scam has proliferated in Chicago over the past year or so. Criminals impersonating charity workers ask for small donations by credit card. They then run up much larger transactions on victims’ cards. One victim, who was scammed in Oak Park, a liberal suburb of the city, says two young men told her they were raising money for the funeral of a murdered relative. Instead they charged almost three thousand dollars to her card. Con men will trick victims into handing over their phones, or grab them, to approve large transactions. Some have getaway cars ready.

The clipboard scam is not entirely new to Chicago. In the past, criminals would ask people to signs petitions to distract them while they pinched bags or phones. But the credit-card fraud aspect is new. It is surprising it should work. Unlike say, wire transfers, credit-card transactions take several days to post, which means they should be easy to stop. But speaking on background, one fraud expert at a big bank says that such in-person fraud may slip through anti-fraud controls, because it is still relatively rare. Using services like PayPal, it is easier than ever for fake merchants to take card payments and cash out quickly.

The new scam suggests some street criminals are diversifying from violence to more lucrative, less risky forms of theft. Only a tiny fraction of reported fraud incidents are criminally prosecuted. The law protects credit-card users: so long as they act promptly, most victims are unlikely to have to pay up. Yet the costs of scammery in general are rising fast. According to the Consumer Sentinel Network, a database of the Federal Trade Commission, last year some $12bn was lost to all types of fraud, a 20% rise on 2023. One uncounted victim: real charities. ■