Short Essay on Consumer Fraud

Short Essay on Consumer Fraud

Consumers become victims of fraud in different ways. Three important ways are sales, advertising, and repairs. Sales fraud refers to selling products of low quality by describing them as products of high quality; refusing to change the defective product or repair it during the guarantee period; fraud concerning the effectiveness of a product; and fraud of concealing information regarding the product which may prove to be harmful.

Many things which only a few decades ago were considered ‘luxuries’ are considered ‘necessities’ today cooking gas, refrigerators, two-wheeler vehicles, pressure-cookers, germ-killing medicines, and so forth largely because the companies selling them have convinced us that it is so. When things are considered necessities, people want to purchase them.

Manufacturers and sellers use fraudulent ploys to attract people to purchase them, making false claims regarding the effectiveness of the product and assuring repair services, etc. But soon the people realise that they have been cheated by purchasing these products.

Sales boys and sales girls misrepresenting the quality of products gain entry in consumers’ homes and sell their products at concessional rates. But soon the fraud is discovered and cases of cheating are reported in newspapers.

Misrepresentation in advertising means that what the prospective buyers are told about the product is false, deceptive or misleading. For example, advertising that a particular scooter gives 60 kilometers a liter of petrol when actually it gives only 35-40 kilometers is advertising fraud.

Advertising that a particular cream removes face pimples in seven days when it does not remove pimples at all or sometimes may even cause skin irritation and other troublesome reactions is advertising fraud. Similar misrepresentation may be found in the advertisements of cement, cooking ‘masalas’, medicines, cosmetics, etc.

Millions and millions of rupees are spent annually on advertising products on television, radio, newspapers and magazines. This is an enormous investment in the art of persuasion.

If the advertisement is only to promote the sale of the product by making people aware of it, spending money on it may be described as rational and logical, but companies try to make considerable profit by concealing harmful information about the product or exaggerating its efficacy. This dishonesty, misrepresentation, deception, and falsehood in sales promotion is a fraud on consumers.

Similar frauds may also be found when it comes to measuring and weighing things. A grocer may give short measure when he weighs out ten kilograms of sugar for a customer, who may be a loser by half a kilogram.

Likewise, instead of giving five meters of cloth as demanded, the cloth-merchant may give only four and a half meters and charge for five meters. He too is guilty of giving short measure and customer is once again a loser. The actual content of a package or container may be less than what is printed on it.

The victim of fraud can be anyone but the most common victims are consumers-persons who buy goods and services from people in the business of selling. This is also called ‘consumer fraud’.

This reaches all the way from one-man small business to the manufacturers of consumer goods, large companies, retail business organisations, etc. With modern packaging practices, a shopper in a grocery shop rarely thinks of checking the weight or the quality of the packed commodity.

If the consumer wants to inspect the packet he is forced in different ways to pay for the ‘inspection’.

While it is true that we have so many laws against consumer fraud, their implementation unfortunately has been rather slow to gain a real momentum largely because their implementation is not in the interest of businessmen, industrialists, bankers, advertisers and financiers, all of whom have considerable support of the powers that be.