In division there is opportunity.

White-collar criminals are no strangers to this concept. They have known that it is to their advantage for law enforcement agencies to operate in isolation from each other.

Because Canada's sophisticated, well-funded white-collar criminals have known how to play the system - and that they have been playing against a divided foe - they have defrauded businesses and consumers with impunity.

Through the 1990s, schemes such as advance-fee loan frauds and phoney lottery schemes proliferated out of boiler rooms in such cities as Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Often they targeted Americans or victims in overseas countries.

Swindlers established such a significant presence that Canada became known to American law enforcement as the Nigeria of the North, in a comparison with that west-central African country where brazen criminals swindle people around the world.

However, in recent years, Canada's law enforcement agencies have been getting their act together.

They have formed strategic partnerships involving such services as municipal police fraud squads, provincial consumer affairs investigators and RCMP commercial crime units to foster information sharing. They have also established close, ongoing partnerships with their American confreres - vast, well-funded law enforcement agencies such as the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and FBI.

These cross-border partnerships now are flushing fraudulent telemarketers out of their boiler rooms. Escape is futile for these scattering cockroaches - the agencies are catching their prey before they can vanish and regroup elsewhere.

"We're finding synergies," Steve Baker of Chicago, director of the FTC's Midwest region, tells Business Edge. "There are synergies in working together. Working together is simply more efficient."

Staff Sgt. Barry Elliott of North Bay-based Phonebusters, a police agency that tracks telemarketing fraud with the support of several police, government and private-sector sponsors, says more Canadian telemarketing swindlers have been arrested and charged in the past three years than ever before.

Elliott credits the cross-border partnerships that have popped up from Vancouver to the Atlantic provinces. "A lot of expense goes into these investigations," he says. "Part of the partnerships is to share the expense burden of the investigation.

"The only way to attack these individuals is through partnerships. You can't do it individually any more."

Baker says the Toronto Strategic Partnership has been particularly successful, with the FTC filing civil or criminal actions in 18 large fraud cases involving hundreds of thousands of American consumers and businesses and tens of millions of dollars.

The partnership, which Baker helped form five years ago, consists of the FTC, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Canada's Competition Bureau, Toronto Police Service fraud squad, Ontario Provincial Police anti-rackets section, Ontario Ministry of Consumer and Business Services, York Regional Police, RCMP and the United Kingdom's Office of Fair Trading.

"The partnerships are the way to go," Baker says. "They're very much the future."

Both Elliott and Baker note that police agencies have access to a smorgasbord of consumer protection laws and procedures when an inter-jurisdictional approach is adopted.

Also, Canadians who commit telemarketing fraud against Americans face the very real risk of being hauled into a court south of the border where legislatures and judges take fraud much more seriously.

An offence that might earn little more than a stern look and a lecture from a judge in Canada can net the offender 25 years of Rock Pile 101 in the American penal system. "The penalties in the U.S. are significant," Elliott says.

Three recent cases:

* In November 2005, the FTC announced that a U.S. District Court in Ohio had granted it a final order barring telemarketers in Montreal from misleading American consumers about their ability - for a fee - to shield them from telemarketing calls.

The order also barred International Protection Centre, Consumers Protection Centre, Alain Chikhani (aka Allain Chikani) and Rafik Chikani from committing other types of fraud such as bank fraud and identity theft.

The FTC and its partners found that the defendants posed as representatives of the FTC, other government agencies or a bank to trick elderly consumers into giving them bank account information.

The order requires the defendants to pay the FTC more than $345,000 US for consumer redress. It also contains a suspended judgment of $1.97 million, payable if the FTC determines they have misrepresented their assets.

* Vancouver businessman John Raymond Salvator Bezeredi allegedly victimized elderly American consumers by selling them non-existent European bonds and an opportunity to win supposed cash prizes.

The FTC claims that Bezeredi told the consumers they would be entered into monthly draws and that they were likely to win substantial cash or regular cash payments. They allege he fleeced his marks through Dominion Investments, Eurobond Fidelity Ltd. and Imperial Investments.

In October 2005, the FTC filed a complaint, along with an application for an injunction and compensation for the victims, in a Seattle court. As well, Bezeredi was arrested in Vancouver pursuant to criminal charges filed by a U.S. Attorney's office in California. Bail was set at $1 million Cdn.

The legal actions brought to a conclusion Project Emptor, a joint investigation of the B.C. Telemarketing Task Force and the FTC. Other participants included the RCMP, the B.C. Business Practices and Consumer Protection Authority, the Competition Bureau, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

* In September 2005, the FTC and its partners in Canada announced the completion of raids and the filing of court actions against the Toronto and Calgary offices of two constellations of firms and individuals operating under the banners of Centurion Financial Benefits and Pacific Liberty Benefits.

The FTC alleges that both engaged in widespread cross-border fraud, including the purported sale of Visa and Mastercard credit cards for an advance fee of $249 US. Pacific Liberty is alleged by the FTC to have taken the fraud one step further, offering to include an array of complimentary gifts with the cards for $319 US.

The consumers did not receive the credit cards or gifts, the FTC alleges in a legal action filed in Illinois.

In a news release, the FTC acknowledges the involvement of several U.S. and Canadian law enforcement partners, including the Toronto and Alberta strategic partnerships.

The Toronto Partnership tackled the Centurion and Pacific Liberty cases. The Alberta Partnership Against Cross-Border Fraud - which got involved in the Centurion case after it was discovered that the network did part of its telemarketing in Calgary - consists of Alberta Government Services, the Calgary and Edmonton Police Services, the Competition Bureau, the RCMP and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

"The Canadian experience is kind of our laboratory," says the FTC's Baker, an attorney. "It's teaching us lessons that we are now using all over the world."

Baker says inter-agency partnerships involve a large degree of trust. "It's not easy," he adds. "Most of us find that a challenge within any organization, let alone something involving a variety of agencies situated in different countries.

"When it works, it's a thing of beauty."

(Brock Ketcham is an Edmonton-based writer who specializes in consumer and public policy issues. He can be reached at brock@businessedge.ca)