Democratic Attorney General candidate Mike Wheat calls it "communication fraud" -- a broad term referring to scammers using e-mail, the post office or the telephone to find fresh victims.

"We hear about it all the time; we read about it all the time," said Wheat, 61, a longtime Bozeman lawyer. "This is one of those areas where the attorney general can really be a facilitator of interagency and interstate focus and prosecution."

Wheat is one of three Democrats campaigning to be his party's attorney general nominee in November. The election is on June 3. Wheat said combating communication fraud would be a top priority for him as attorney general, if elected.

Communication fraud takes many forms, he said. It can be payday lenders targeting poor people with high-interest loans by sending ads to their mailboxes. It can e-mails from official-sounding fake banks trying to get people to share their account information. It could be fake charities targeting the wealthy with phone calls seeking donations or people targeting kids on Internet networking sites.

Such crimes are not entirely new, Wheat said, but the Internet and e-mail have opened up a lot of new doors for scammers.

Many of these crimes are difficult for local law enforcement to track down and prosecute. The perpetrators are unnamed strangers who could be located "anywhere on the globe," Wheat said.

Private lawyers may be reluctant to step in because the sums involved, while important to the victim, are often not enough to cover the costs of working on the case, to say nothing of repaying the victim.

"I want to be an advocate for people," Wheat said. "I want to stop people from being victimized."

Wheat said he would attack the problem from many fronts, starting with public education. The Justice Department, headed by the attorney general, could act as a tracking agency for all scams operating in the state. The office would send out e-mail alerts to senior centers and others, even citizens, so they would know to recognized frauds and avoid them.

He said the state's existing consumer protection office could give local seminars and offer trainings to law enforcement. The agency could also provide a factual account of interest charged by payday lenders to people would know what they're getting into before signing up for one the loans.

"If we can prevent the crimes from happening in the first place, I would consider it successful," he said.

As for prosecuting such crimes, Wheat said the attorney general is in a good spot to work with agencies in other states even other countries to bring perpetrators of frauds to justice.

While Wheat said he would make combating such crimes a top priority, he also said he didn't think the effort necessarily needed a whole new office within the Justice Department.

Wheat also said he didn't know if the effort would require a lot more money, but said he would study the agency's budget to see if money is currently being put to best use. But if he concluded that more money was needed, Wheat said he would go to lawmakers and push to get the extra cash.

Right now, many of these crimes are being quietly tolerated, often by segments of society least able to defend themselves: children, the elderly, the poor.

"You need an attorney general who is really going to be an advocate for those people," he said. "That's what I think public service is about."