SCAMMING continues to chip away at the youth’s view of success and wealth.

As a result, officials reiterate arguments that Jamaican youth need to be exposed better opportunities and real success stories to serve as motivation.

Information technology expert Craig Powe said impressionable youngsters need visible routes to success, road maps and guide marks that help them travel the same path as their role models, as well as positive encouragement along that path.

“If people don’t believe they can make it the legitimate way, and they see others doing things that are ‘easier’ and having instant success, they will decide to go after that,” Powe told the Jamaica Observer in an interview last Friday.

“Children of business owners become business owners, just as nephews who are close become the same. When people do not have good examples around them and encouragement, they look in their community for what makes sense and what they see themselves as.”

While many people continue to fall victim to scams the US Embassy in Kingston has warned that if it seems too good to be true, it is in fact not true.

“Do not believe that you have won a lottery you never entered; it is illegal to play foreign lotteries from the United States. Do not believe any offers that require a fee to be paid up front. Do not provide personal or financial information to individuals or businesses you don’t know or haven’t verified. Do not send any money to someone you do not know. Do not attempt to recover funds personally or travel to Jamaica to transfer money.”

Speaking during a Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange, Dianne McIntosh, executive director of the Citizen Security Secretariat, said scamming has become widespread.

“It’s around us. We at the Citizens Security Secretariat, because we collect the data and interact with teachers, principals, schools, unions, we are able to monitor or track what we call hot spots. We’re using the GIS information to overlay everything,” she said.

“The music is there… ‘100 million is nothing to draw down.’ The principals will say, ‘Yes, this activity is taking place around us in the schools.’ But we have to afford a new direction, a new opportunity. You have to give the students new events to look at,” McIntosh added.

The Faculty of Science and Technology at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, in partnership with AddisCoder, Inc, the Caring Hands of Rastafari (C.H.O.R) Foundation, and members of the Diaspora employed by Google, hosted the JamCoders summer camp from July 4 to 29 last year.

The summer camp was geared towards getting children who have never programmed before to teach them how to do so.

The idea to start JamCoders was initially conceived by Jamar “Chronixx” McNaughton and his team after learning about the AddisCoder programme in Ethiopia.

McIntosh said Citizen Security Secretariat, in recognising the work being done by JamCoders, tried to get students into the programme but was unsuccessful due to a lack of interest on the part of the students, she told the Sunday Observer.

“We couldn’t find anybody in the schools who wanted to participate in that. Let us be real, we have a high literacy problem and distrust so part of collecting data and working with people and working in schools is to also be able to see where all the pathways are.

“We can say minister of local government can use this or minister of justice can do something over here, and we bring everybody together. The idea is to bring it to them. Bring the technology. Expose them to what is possible. It is not only scamming [that’s available as an option].”

Powe agreed.

“Forrest Gump made America believe anyone could be a millionaire. Scamming shows that you just need a call list to do it. We need more visible examples told in the community — in full length — of people who got out and really made it,” Powe told the Sunday Observer.

“Usain Bolt and Shelly have, and will continue to create hundreds of track stars. We need the same clear path for other careers documented and society supporting them at the community level.”

In addition McIntosh said that slowly, culture can be changed by adjusting what’s changing the communities and the risk factors in the communities.

To do so, she said the schools and community will have to be exposed to new things.

“By just exposing the school, the parents get involved. This type of social intercourse, you bring in a lot of different people, a lot of entities into a space. And when people see the enthusiasm and the change and opportunities, they pursue different things. Scamming is nothing. Scamming is short-lived; by 25 maybe you’re not going to be around.”

Commenting on whether some students misuse technology after being exposed academically, director for the Safety and Security in Schools Unit at the Ministry of Education and Youth, Richard Troupe said the possibility of a link does exist.

“I don’t want to boast that this is providing support and not necessarily the implication. I think, though, that the bigger conversation should be that we have a general society that has been kind of condoning, facilitating the scamming and many other things — the glorification of scamming, sex and violence,” he told the Sunday Observer.

“Clearly, what I can say is that these subjects in our classes that are being offered at school probably would have contributed significantly to the BPO sector where so many young people are now transitioning into that area of work, creating some kind of employment opportunity for them.”

Troupe argued that Jamaica overlooks glorification concerning many things in music, then marvel at the outcome.

“And then on the one hand, we see that and then we are wondering how comes we are seeing the violence in our schools. We have to hold our different segments of the society accountable for what is being produced out there,” he said.

Also, the US Embassy in Kingston said the American Citizen Services section in Kingston receive frequent inquiries from citizens who have been defrauded of thousands of dollars by advance fee fraud scammers in Jamaica.

The embassy said the most prevalent in Jamaica is the lottery scam, where scammers lead victims to believe that they have won a drawing or lottery but the cash or prizes will not be released without upfront payment of fees or taxes.

Troupe added: “The other thing that we have to pay attention to is that some of the scammers are persons who leave school… some of them never complete school but they are able to use their skills [for example] when you hear them twang to convince others. So what [is it] about education that is not necessarily reaching… tapping into that creative energy of our boys and girls and redirecting that in a positive way?”

It is also something that as an education system, Troupe lamented, needs to be addressed.

“Are we providing the guidance for our students? Those who, from they are born, they can sing? They might not pass a CSEC subject but you wonder how they can compose music, and the quality lyrics. How do we help to inform the kind of lyrical content and help to channel the creative energies of our boys and girls to more productive things, rather than glorifying those things around us that is not really helping our country? That is a conversation we need to have.”