Critical Mick

Eamon Dillon's Fraudsters is the most important Irish crime book-fiction or non- ever published. Most crime titles can inform, entertain, or focus popular wrath and revulsion. The best can move its reader. Fraudsters is the one which might actually prevent you serious misery.

An alarming number of unscrupulous chancers are, today, running scams to rip off average Irish people. Sunday World investigative journalist Eamon Dillon exposes ten different shades of deceit and trickery. Insurance fraud, pyramid schemes, counterfeit goods, confidence men posing as builders or budgie salesmen: all are detailed with specific modus operandi, leads, hooks and the twists of their stings. The sum effect is to communicate to readers a set of red flags which should go up when some convincing character starts feeding out a line of shit.

Chapter One: The Charmers relates the crimes of three serial con artists.

Unchanged by infrequent stretches in jail, and armed with false credentials and the ability to lie convincingly, these three have swindled millions. It's a shocking eye opener that begins Dillon's second book.

Additional chapters cover the suave playboy thief Juan Carlos Guzman-Betancourt, whose arrest in Dublin made headlines in 2005. Details on Irish cases of ATM fraud and credit card skimming, and in-depth account of the farm subsidies fraud and livestock smuggling which bilk millions- stupidity and greed that almost introduced deadly diseases into the country. Dozens of distinct examples are given in a court reporter's detail. Even for readers with a long-term interest in crime, Fraudsters holds the promise of many new tricks. Fraudsters also covers Carousel VAT fraud- a scam that Frank Abagnale never mentioned.

The most interesting chapter, to fans of Monte Davis' brilliant letters, certainly, is Chapter six: The 419ers. Though the Nigerian legal system has lent its code numbers to this variety of advance fee fraud, the criminals behind it have operated out of Ireland. Dillon dishes the dirt.

Recommendation from Eamon Dillon: "If you want serious facts and figures about 419 scams have a look at ultrascan.nl. A guy there called Frank Englesman is always up for sharing information."

Dillon names and provides photos of the liars who have carried out these scams. As most of the con artists are free or serving only short sentences, this struck me as brave. Ireland is a small country with a long memory.

It also has a reputation of brilliant writers, though to judge by some titles I have slogged through few are writing Irish Crime. Eamon Dillon knows both how to pack information in and keep a narrative moving. A wealth of precautionary warning has been packed into these 279 pages, and there is not a dull one amongst them.

Critical Mick says: Fraudsters is brilliant stuff. I am hoping that Eamon Dillon's first book, The Outsiders: Exposing the Secretive World of Ireland's Travellers, is just as good.

Update, March 2010: The Outsiders reviewed!