MINISTER without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister responsible for science, technology, and special projects Dr Andrew Wheatley yesterday highlighted a serious pestilence that has started plaguing Jamaica’s post-disaster recovery efforts, where opportunists have been moving in with charity scams, twisting donors’ generosity into their personal payday.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, when the focus should be on recovery, he shared details of how reprobates are creating another kind of disaster born out of human deceit, through Internet fraud.

Mr Wheatley told a post-hurricane media briefing that unscrupulous individuals were trying to take advantage of the situation, creating fraudulent websites attempting to exploit donors’ generosity.

Jamaica’s Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT) has detected multiple suspicious domains, he said, designed to divert hurricane relief donations away from legitimate channels, creating fake websites with names similar to official channels and soliciting donations.

Mr Wheatley said while Jamaica’s CIRT was actively monitoring for additional fraudulent domains, donors should verify the legitimacy of sites, so their generosity reaches those who need it most, and not criminal enterprises.

When disaster strikes, humanity’s first instinct is compassion. In a moral panic, people will open their wallets and their hearts and, knowing this, within hours of tragedy, the slick websites pop up, with touching photos and videos. They exploit the chaos and the rush to help. The fraud flourishes because it’s easy, fast, and emotionally potent.

The Digital Age has made it laughably simple to create a convincing online charity. A few stolen images, a GoFundMe page, and a sob story are all it takes to tap into people’s collective conscience. And, in this age of artificial intelligence, easily manipulated images and videos are widely circulated, preying on people’s emotions and vulnerability.

Scammers understand that disasters put people in the kind of spirit that they feel doing something, anything, is better than doing nothing. They weaponise compassion and create a revenue stream.

We should all be concerned, because the havoc wreaked, the damage these scammers do, go far beyond stolen money. Every dollar that lands in a fraudster’s account is a dollar not going to the many, many people who actually need it for their rebuilding efforts. Scams also erode public trust in legitimate charities, making donors sceptical and hesitant the next time tragedy strikes.

That hesitation can cost lives.

That’s why Mr Wheatley’s warning this early into the post-Melissa aid efforts is very necessary and timely. And it is commendable that, with everything else that’s on the Government’s plate in this vast disaster recovery effort, they caught on to the need to ensure that post-disaster fraud is crushed early and decisively, and that the fraudsters are identified, exposed, and potentially prosecuted.

Disasters bring out the best in humanity, but, unfortunately, they also bring out the worst. Jamaica’s CIRT has been thankfully proactive, because when fraud festers in the ruins of a disaster, the disaster never really ends for those affected.

The Internet should not be a playground for thieves hiding behind hashtags of “relief” and “solidarity”, and tragedies should not be a feeding frenzy for crooks.