Gazans Fall Victim to Tunnel Scam

As if the military campaign last January that destroyed thousands of homes and the ongoing economic blockade of their homeland by Israel don't make life hard enough in Gaza, The Guardian reports that thousands of Gazans have another problem - they've lost their life savings to scam artists.

The scam centered on the hundreds of smuggling tunnels running under the sealed Gaza/Egypt border. Because of the Israeli blockade, the tunnels have become the life-blood of the Gazan economy - just about everything is brought through them: food, building materials, luxury items and creature comforts. The amount of commerce flowing through these tunnels has made some of their operators rich, and there's the hook for the scam: that investors could turn a quick profit by helping to fund the construction of more tunnels (tunnel construction can cost upwards of $100,000).

In a land with epidemic levels of unemployment, the offers seemed too good to pass up. Problem was that these tunnels people invested in didn’t, and never would, exist; scammers took investors money and disappeared. According to officials in Gaza, the tunnel scam has already netted $100 million from duped investors, though other estimates put the loss total much higher. Meanwhile, Gaza's Hamas-led government doesn't seem to be too willing to investigate the tunnel scam because of their own involvement in the smuggling industry and because some of the lead scammers likely have ties to the organization themselves.