WITH roughly 178 people arrested and charged with lottery-scamming and money-laundering activities by the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA), the organisation continues to make the capture of scammers and money launderers one of the top priorities of the its mandate.
MOCA, which celebrated its first anniversary recently, is the combination of the anti-corruption branch of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) and the MOCA task force that was established on August 4 last year with a mandate to deal with major organised crime, police corruption, public sector corruption and economic and financial crimes.
According to the head of MOCA, Colonel Desmond Edwards, of the 531 people arrested, 351 of them were charged, with the majority of those charged being accused of lottery scamming. Despite the backlog of cases already before the courts, Edwards said that MOCA has managed to get special sittings in the Home Circuit Court for lottery scam cases. “Recently in western Jamaica, they actually tried quite a number of these cases and there were quite a few convictions as a result,” said Edwards, who was speaking at the Jamaica Observer Press Club at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue, St Andrew headquarters, last Friday.
Edwards said that while there was not enough statistical data available to formally speak on whether or not the lottery-scamming business was growing, it seemed that there has been more of a displacement of the activity, as it is spreading further across the island and no longer just “a St James or Montego Bay problem”.
The lawman said that as a result, commissioner of police Carl Williams has mandated that different geographical divisions be formed to deal with lottery- scamming cases and as such, MOCA has been working closely with these divisions, particulary the western ones, in building capacity on how to deal with such investigations.