Fraud in Dominica

Fraud in Dominica is shaped by small-island market dynamics, regional fintech adoption, and cross-border crime that targets residents from overseas call centres and online schemes. Local institutions issue frequent scam alerts and training grows more specialised, while transnational networks continue to probe vulnerabilities in payments, messaging apps, charities, and elder-targeted fraud.

Fraud landscape and main typologies

Independent assessments describe financial crimes that primarily target individuals through phishing, fake financial services, card skimming, and pyramid or Ponzi schemes. The CFATF Mutual Evaluation for 2023 flags fraud and theft as common predicate offences for money laundering, notes alerts about pyramid schemes and ATM scams, and highlights the need for better statistical systems to measure prevalence. This is consistent with broader Caribbean analyses showing advance-fee frauds, romance scams, and multi-level investment cons.

A second thread involves transnational elder-fraud rings. While many cases are pursued by U.S. agencies, they frequently implicate Caribbean call-centre affiliates and money movers and can pull in victims from Dominica’s diaspora. Enforcement actions in 2024 and 2025 against “grandparent scam” networks illustrate the scale, with indictments against multiple conspirators and warnings about cross-border laundering channels. These prosecutions matter locally because they inform prevention messaging and bank controls for suspicious transactions linked to overseas calls.

Signals from regulators, banks, and the courts

The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) has repeatedly warned residents across its currency union about digital scams. In January 2025, it cautioned against a so-called stablecoin that misused ECCB branding, and in May 2025, it devoted an episode of ECCB Connects to practical defences against financial scams. Local banks amplify these alerts. In October 2024, the National Bank of Dominica Ltd posted a notice advising customers that the bank would never ask them to change mobile-banking passwords by text or email. These signals suggest institutions are seeing enough attempted fraud to justify recurring public messaging.

Over the past two decades, the National Cooperative Credit Union matters have surfaced in coverage of employee theft and case management outcomes. Although such reports are episodic rather than statistical, they confirm that internal abuse and small-value theft coexist alongside more sophisticated external schemes.

Laws, institutions, and how fraud cases flow

Fraud is rarely a solitary act; it is often entangled with money laundering, cybercrime, and tax offences, creating a network of illicit activity that feeds into and strengthens each other. To counter this, Dominica’s legal framework has established a range of interconnected laws. Core legislation includes the Proceeds of Crime Act, the Money Laundering Prevention Act, and the Money Laundering Prevention Regulations SRO 4 of 2013, which address criminal proceeds and laundering networks. Alongside these are the Electronic Crimes Bill (2013), targeting cyber-enabled fraud and digital manipulation; the Income Tax Act, Chapter 67:01 and the Value Added Tax Act, criminalising fraudulent declarations and evasions; and the Companies Act (Act No. 21 of 1994), which enforces accountability against fraudulent filings and concealment of beneficial ownership. Regulatory oversight is strengthened by the Financial Services Unit Act, which empowers the FSU to supervise compliance within the financial sector, while the International Business Companies Act ensures offshore structures are not abused for tax evasion or laundering. Cross-border cooperation is anchored in the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, Chapter 12:20 and the Extradition Act, allowing Dominica to pursue offenders internationally. Collectively, this legislative web shows that fraud is not isolated but addressed as part of a wider system linking financial regulation, taxation, cybercrime enforcement, and anti-terrorist financing measures.

In practice, the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) analyzes suspicious transaction reports that often cite fraud typologies, while the Financial Services Unit (FSU) supervises banks, credit unions, insurers, and money services to enforce customer due diligence, record keeping, and internal reporting. When a fraud case produces assets or bank activity, prosecutors may pursue restraining or confiscation orders in the High Court of Justice under the Proceeds of Crime framework. CFATF’s 2023 review specifically ties fraud to Dominica’s money-laundering risk profile and urges stronger data collection.

Numbers we can cite today

Official, comprehensive fraud statistics for Dominica are limited in public sources, but there are concrete, case-based figures and dated events that indicate patterns:

• 2015: Former National Cooperative Credit Union staff member charged in a theft of more than EC$33,000. Case reports illustrate internal control risks within financial institutions.
• 2018: Court strikes out a prior NCCU theft matter for want of prosecution, a reminder that outcomes can hinge on procedure and case-management timelines.
• 2023: CFATF evaluation references fraud and theft among prominent predicate offenses, with pyramid schemes and ATM scams flagged in analytical products that inform law enforcement and supervisors.
• 2024: IOM-supported training in Roseau focuses on document examination and forgery detection for border and police units, reflecting rising concern about identity and document fraud.
• 2024–2025: U.S. agencies charge and extradite suspects in transnational elder-fraud schemes; these cases emphasize phone-based social engineering, cash couriers, and cross-border laundering that can implicate Caribbean nodes.
• 2025: ECCB issues a public warning about a fraudulent stablecoin using its logo and later releases guidance content on recognizing and reporting scams, signaling continued pressure in digital channels.

This single list is not exhaustive, but it provides dated touchpoints that policymakers and journalists can triangulate with pending court bulletins and future FIU releases.

Drivers, victims, and methods

Dominica’s exposure to fraud reflects three reinforcing conditions. First, the island’s openness to global communications and ecommerce delivers benefits and risks, with phishing, account-takeover attempts, and online investment pitches moving freely through messaging apps. Second, diaspora ties connect local residents and businesses to overseas financial flows that can be exploited by fraudsters posing as relatives, service providers, or government agents. Third, data from regional studies show that Ponzi and advance-fee schemes remain a Caribbean-wide threat, often marketed as offshore investments or crypto arbitrage. The resulting harms are concentrated in households and smaller firms, where one incident can erase savings or working capital.

Banks report ongoing waves of credential-harvesting texts and emails that imitate login pages. Card fraud can involve ATM skimmers or compromised merchants. Charity and nonprofit abuse risks are addressed in Dominica’s counter-terrorist financing law, which sets oversight standards to prevent misuse of community organizations to collect or channel funds under false pretenses. On the public sector side, procurement and payroll fraud are persistent global risks; Dominica’s asset-recovery laws and AML obligations are designed to surface and deter these where they intersect with the financial system.

What institutions are doing

Authorities increasingly combine prevention, supervision, and enforcement. The FIU’s analytical products, cited by CFATF, have informed targeted police operations, while the FSU’s risk-based supervision focuses time and resources on higher-risk entities and products. The ECCB and local banks push recurring consumer education to reduce the success rate of phishing and social-engineering attacks. Border-management and police training in 2024 on forgery detection tackles identity fraud that can enable account opening or money pickups under aliases. Each initiative aims to reduce vulnerability before losses occur.

Within firms, the Money Laundering Prevention Regulations SRO 4 of 2013 require compliance officers, staff training, internal escalation of suspicious activity, and record-keeping robust enough to support investigations. When accounts show patterns consistent with fraud proceeds, banks file STRs to the Financial Intelligence Unit, triggering analysis and potential referrals to law enforcement. Supervisors can inspect, sanction, or restrict non-compliant institutions, which creates strong incentives for better authentication, transaction monitoring, and customer education.

Regulator warnings from early 2025 highlight two practical points. First, verify branding and licensing claims for any financial product, especially those using the ECCB’s name. Second, treat unsolicited “urgent” contacts as high-risk. Never move funds, buy vouchers, or hand over cash to couriers based on a call or text. For merchants and SMEs, insist on strong multi-factor authentication, reconcile point-of-sale and online orders daily, and maintain a documented process for reporting suspicious chargebacks or invoice changes. These steps align with the prevention advice ECCB shared publicly and with global best practices for small jurisdictions.

Data gaps and what to watch

The CFATF review highlights the need for consistent, centralized statistics across police, prosecutors, and regulators. Publishing annual tables that break out fraud by type, value, and outcome would help agencies and the public track progress. Two near-term watch-items are worth noting: attempts to misuse crypto branding or tokens to attract local investors, and continued targeting of older residents through phone and messaging apps by overseas callers. As enforcement pressure rises in larger markets, some schemes will look for new entry points, which can shift attention toward smaller Eastern Caribbean economies.