Asloppy provision of the federal Bills of Exchange Act, the complacency — or is it the complicity? — of the B.C. court system, and Money Mart’s business practices continue to make life easy for fraud artists.

That’s the shameful picture I still see when, seven months after my last column on the subject — and prodded by a call from a 71-year-old who appears doomed to become another victim — I peer back into this unpleasant world.

The about-to-be-victim is Stan Green. He struck a deal back in February with a contractor who turned out to be a con man to do some work on his Point Grey home. He gave the guy a $1,000 cheque postdated for March 1.

If you do a Google search on this guy’s company — said to be located at an address the RCMP say was vacated a couple of years ago — it looks professional. If you Google him personally, the first page to pop up is an RCMP warning about his fraudulent past.

This came to Green’s attention before March 1, the date on the cheque. So he stopped the cheque and told the con/contractor that payment was being withheld and the deal was off.

The con/contractor didn’t tell him at the time — though he later bragged of it — but he had already cashed the cheque at a North Vancouver Money Mart.

Now Money Mart is suing Green. My guess is they might very well win, thanks to a hard-to-fathom provision of the federal Bills of Exchange Act.

The act, which I wrote about in August, allows anyone who cashes a third-party cheque “in good faith” to collect from the issuer, even if payment is stopped.

Near as I can tell, provincial small claims courts seem to deem the “in good faith” provision to mean the cheque-cashing company can collect as long as nobody told them the cheque was bad. Talk about an incentive to do little or no due diligence! Nor is Green the only victim. I checked at Robson Square in Vancouver — just one of eight Lower Mainland courts where small claims cases are heard — and found that, since Jan. 1, National Money Mart has launched 54 law suits in this location alone. So well known is this company to court staff that, when I asked a clerk to help me search for Money Mart cases, he advised me to have a pen and “lots of paper” at hand to keep track.

The court records system is slow and awkward to access, and I couldn’t determine if many or all these cases are against people who’ve written cheques and then, for legitimate reasons, stopped payment. I attempted to spotcheck half a dozen, and succeeded in contacting only one.

“Are you being sued by Money Mart?” I asked Larry Traverence, the vice-president of Archer Realty in Richmond.

“Oh yes,” he said. His company had paid a subcontractor who “lost” the cheque. So they put a stop-payment on it, issued another, “and the bugger cashed them both at Money Mart.”

Now Money Mart is suing the company — not the fraudulent subcontractor. Another case of a fraudster being abetted by a combination of the federal law, the provincial court and Money Mart’s practice of pursuing the sittingduck victim rather than the dodgy victimizer.

And these cases are eerily similar to those I wrote about last summer, and a couple I sat through in court but didn’t write about. It looks like a standard operating practice to me — one well understood by the bad guys who profit from it, but an unpleasant surprise to the hapless victims.

The RCMP — despite a pious plea to report suspected frauds — won’t even investigate Green’s complaint because, they say, it hasn’t cost him money. Yet.

And the politicians in power don’t seem interested at all.

Green tells me Premier Gordon Campbell — another Point Grey guy — didn’t even answer his letter. AttorneyGeneral Wally Oppal tsk-tsked about the practice when we spoke in August, but said it was up to Solicitor-General John Les to fix it. Yet when I called Les’s office to get a comment for this column, I only heard back from staffers trying to deflect me back to Oppal. I got no answer to a specific question about how Money Mart gets its inabsentia judgments against people it’s suing, and not so much as the courtesy of “no comment” from Les himself.

I’m pleased to say, however, that Green did get a detailed, somewhat helpful response from NDP MP Libby Davis, whom he contacted because his Vancouver Quadra riding had, at the time, no MP. And Davis told me Tuesday that she’ll take the matter up with National Revenue Minister Gordon O’Connor and press for a revision of the law.

It is one thing, she and I agree, to offer cheque-cashers protection against people trying to cheat them. But it’s another to grant them a licence to further victimize the victims of fraud.