Utah's not No. 1 ... for fraud
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1 Comment [ View ]Let's be honest about this: For those of us who have made our lives in Utah, we know it isn't a perfect place. We love it. We're not moving. But, still, it's not all milk and honey.
Over the decades, one self-criticism about the Beehive State has been repeated over and over so many times we all had come to regard it as a fact: We're a gullible bunch and, as such, Utah is the fraud capital of the nation.
Except it's not true. Indeed, we're not even close to being No. 1.
We're No. 11. Admittedly, 50th would be even better. But 11th is a whole lot better than first.
Guess which state is first? Colorado. Arizona (No. 4) and Nevada (No. 9) have more fraud complaints that Utah, too. This is according to the Utah Foundation, a respected public policy research organization, which just released a report on Utah crime statistics.
Utah looks even better if you compare other, similar numbers. Expanding the net to include all white-collar crime arrests per 100,000 people, Utah plunges all the way down to 34th. South Carolina is No. 1, with a white-collar crime arrest rate 6.5 times higher than Utah's 86.4 arrests per 100,000 population.
The Utah Foundation could only guess as to why Utah has had such a persistent self-image as the fraud and/or white-collar-crime capital of the U.S. Maybe, its president said, it's because a majority of the state belongs to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and when they hear about a co-religionist being preyed upon by a scam artist -- like the recent guilty plea of Ogden's Val Southwick, who scammed more than $100 million out of people, including a lot of LDS Church members -- they feel a shared sense of violation.
But that's only a guess.
The important information is that Utah's not the Dupe State, after all. And we're on the low end when it comes to people being arrested for committing the crimes.
This doesn't mean we should become smug and let down our guard. Fraud still happens. White-collar criminals are out there, looking for new victims. In order to maintain our No. 11 and No. 34 positions, we'll have to remain wary.
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The wire service story that reported the fraud stats also reported that of the top eleven states for fraud, nine were western states. Nine of the eleven. I thought that was interesting. Why should western states have so much more reported fraud than states in other regions? I have no idea what the answer might be, but found the fact curious.
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