Property crimes are really crimes against a person’s life.

What is money, really? Money is the fruit of your labor--of your time and effort spent gaining particular skills and then spending years on the job to save up and accumulate whatever you can.

In other words, money is a tangible representation of your life--those hours, days, years spent doing something--that somebody now wants to rob you of.

So when you have you car stolen or someone cons you into giving them $10,000 or $100,000 this may be, in effect, years of your life that they have taken from you. Years of work, years of savings, years of accomplishments that have now been obliterated.

It’s not just things that you’re losing with theft--you’re quite literally losing parts of your own life.

These days you’re not even safe sitting at home because criminals can still attempt to rob you using your own digital devices--like phones or computers--sending messages, looking to exploit human naivety.

And what is the greatest risk they are facing for trying to rob thousands of people of parts of their lives, cumulatively amounting to thousands of human lifespans? A few years in prison, maybe--with the ultimate sentence often reduced for good behavior.

Let’s do a little thought experiment--let’s assume an average person could save up about $10,000 per year and we’re professionally active for about 40 years, between about 20 and 60. So a theft of $400,000 is effectively a theft of an entire professional lifespan of a single person.

Even in arguably the safest city in the world--Singapore--money lost to scams exceeded $80 million in the first half of 2019. That is approximately 8000 years worth of personal savings robbed by criminals from citizens and companies in the country.

Taken from here