University report scores sales exploit on Indigenous communities
A report released by James Cook University has revealed that aggressive marketing has been lately trained on Indigenous Australians as telemarketers and roving salespersons focus on the outlying communities, apparently banking on their lack of financial and legal knowledge to clinch sales pitch.
Report author Heron Loban scored the deliberate tactics to lure the Indigenous people to buy or subscribe to products with little or no access to financial services or advice, and eventually facing up payment bills for goods and services they did not want or were not aware they had bought during a call.
He added that these rogue salespeople exploited cultural and language barriers to dupe Indigenous people into a sales deal, stressing "they only have English as a second or third language and there are also sometimes lower levels of education or literacy or numeracy."
Indigenous Consumer Assistance Network (ICAN) spokesman Drew Dangar said rogue traders regularly preyed on the most vulnerable members of the community who were incapable of understanding contracts and were made to buy products they don't need and can't even use.
While most Australians would usually turn their back on salespersons, he said that Indigenous would in turn entertain these marketers to avoid causing offence and sheepishly agree to sales that could cost them up to thousands of dollars.
Mr Dangar lamented that Indigenous people would even refuse to deal with the problem even upon realisation that they were ripped off, adding that "Out of shame, people don't want to deal with it because they don't want to appear that they're stupid and they've done something wrong."