Phishers Face Jail Time Under New U.S. Bill

An anonymous reader writes "Democrat Patrick Leahy has introduced a new federal anti-phishing bill that would impose jail terms up to five years and fines up to $250,000 for criminals creating fake web site designed to con consumers in to giving them their personal information. 'Some phishers can be prosecuted under wire fraud or identity theft statutes, but often these prosecutions take place only after someone has been defrauded - that leaves plenty of time to cover their tracks. Traditional wire fraud and identity theft statutes are not sufficient to respond to phishing.' said Leahy in a statement regarding the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005."

Comments

I'm glad about this

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Assuming it works and is enforceable, of course. I think phishing is a pretty low way to live your life - preying on the gullible. Been done for thousands of years, true, but taking advantage of people is no way to live your life IMO.

better solution.

[Lumpy]

I already start up an app to poison their databases every time I get one ofthose paypal,ebay or lately, the yahoo greeting card phishing scams.

point a particular java app at the url and let her fly filling in all the form fields over and over and over again with what looks like real but is generated from files crap.

if the asshats have to sift through 300 bad records to find something useable, at least I slowed them down a bit.

If more people in the know did this to them instead of the worthless action of reporting them it would make a bigger impact. the last one I reported to ebay was still up days later. My second alert to ebay was responded with "we cant deal with them all, go away" but in nicer words.