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US Failing To Prosecute Online Criminals
Ashlynne9423 writes "A report by the Center for American Progress and the Center for Democracy and Technology has found there is too little action being taken against online criminals, despite rising consumer concern about online safety. The report found that state officials were spending only 40 per cent of case time investigating online fraudsters, preferring instead to concentrate on higher profile solicitation and pornography cases."
They seem to get more years in the clink than murderers and pedophiles.
Then they can look at all that porn and say "It's all in the line of duty".
What actions are taken about those who ''first post'' ? :-)
It's easier to drop the hammer on college kids for downloading media online then it is to hunt down people exploiting masses of small phish. Besides IAAs have deeper pockets and are much more influencial than a amorphous blob of (unknown) online victims.
So that would be summarised as "Prosecutors go for cases that make them look good" and "Prosecutors avoid cases where the crime isn't as well understood"* then?
* because the general populace understand "he killed her" or "he was doing things he shouldn't to children" but tech-crime gets a glazed look from all the buzzwords.
Second look at becoming an Online Criminal!
Seriously though, as a basically honest person and an IT geek I find it incredibly frustrating to hear stuff like this. It's bad enough that non-specialist IT folk (general net admins and support people) get paid fuck-all despite that they are the backbone of the IT world. But to find that with a minimal amount of study and a willingness to break multiple laws you can essentially double, triple or quadruple your income and NOBODY BOTHERS TO HUNT YOU DOWN FOR IT is incredibly depressing. More and more it seems, honesty is rewarded with a kick in the crotch, and being a societal leech is rewarded with cash payouts and bling.
Why am I an honest person again?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
If it were possible to smoke pot on the internet(thc/ip?) we would be wasting most of our time prosecuting that.
I'd like to see a headline like "Malware Creators of XP AntiVirus 2008 Charged Today"...
When it's as straight forward as this, and they trick people to actualy get their useless software, (which doesn't protect you at all, it just infects other PC's), it's just plain evident that there's no one interested in going after criminals even in plain sight. **sigh**
Just makes Symantec Ghost and Acronis more important to use...
End of Line.
Gary McKinnon must be delighted with this news......
Spend your day looking at smut or crawling through log files for dodgy transactions?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you look at law enforcement in general, and it's not just a US problem, petty crime has a pretty bad interest by police period.
If a citizen isn't essentially holding the criminal for police to arrive(like in the case of shoplifting), or the crime happens in front of the officer, if it's not violent they really don't do much.
So things like car theft, burglary of unoccupied homes, etc... All low priority. Heck, I've heard of burlary rings that don't even care of a house is alarmed - police response time is so slow that they have time to steal everything they want and leave before the police arrive. One was even spoofing the alarm people, delaying things even more.
This, of coures, irks the heck out of me because I hate to see crime pay, and effective law enforcement is a good way to ensure that it doesn't. Every crime that 'pays off' encourages them in the future.
I don't read AC A human right
Call me when Sony have been prosecuted for the crime of contravening the Computer Misuse Act in my country... and maybe then I'll care.
Too often people want to go after the "Big Fish", not realizing that the smaller fish aren't as smart thus making it easier to catch a bunch of them on one net & benefiting more people at once.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I don't, I see my local time (which is neither US nor GMT). Check your account preferences..
Not a pleasant outfit. Check out some customers' stories. Despite loads of evidence they're taking peoples' money, the law won't even investigate them.
I believe the Center for Democracy and Technology comes down closer to the side of NAMBLA and against ISP restrictions on child pron, so I am not surprised to see their name in an article saying we spend too much time prosecuting pron and not enough time going after fraud.
Yes, they frame the argument as a First Ammendment/free speech issue, but I still have a hard time agreeing with anything they say.
Anyway, 40%? That almost half their time. I suppose a very anti-pron group could say, "state officials were spending nearly half their case time investigating online fraudsters..." to frame an argument about the need to more actively protect children from on-line pron.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
A U-Tube Video of an execution of on line criminals would be a great deterrent against cyber crime. A nice beheading... or perhaps impaling the miscreant....
Anything involving child porn gets people whipped up into a lynch mob mentality. A lot of people even get like that when you have material that involves teens; I've seen people argue with a straight face that a 17 year old is a child, even though that "child" can sign up for the armed forces with parental consent (guess this means we have an army that employs child-soldiers a la Africa...).
Financial crimes... not so much. We're squeamish about sending white collar criminals who really hurt their victims to prison for very, very long periods of time in prisons which are scary. I think part of it is the bias; they don't always look like scary malcontents who should be permanently removed from society even though they are predators.
It's a fact that prosecutors, in general, get points in their career for how many harsh sentences they score; few offices reward prosecutors for showing a sense of mercy and having a real thirst for justice. A buddy of mine was actually prosecuted for assault for pushing away a drunk girl who was trying to beat up him. Thank God the judge ripped up the charges and dismissed them as baseless bullshit. Didn't matter to the prosecutor, who knew on the evidence before him that it was a classic case of self-defense.
The real corruption is in the prosecutorial profession, now the cops these days. The cops get their cues from the prosecutors; if the prosecutors don't want white collar criminals, the cops will focus more on sex offenses.
From TFS: "A report by the Center for American Progress and the Center for Democracy and Technology"
Center for American Progress?
Center for Democracy and Technology?
Who are these people? Sounds suspiciously a lot like "The Bureau of Truth" or "The ministry of Freedom", or some other pseudo-Orwellian concoction.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
they are "preferring ... to concentrate on higher profile solicitation and pornography cases."
Would you rather sort through a bunch of bogus domain names, email addresses, offshored servers etc. to catch some pimple faced phisher, or look at porn all day and chat with online babes? For most people it is a 'no brainer.'
Just like in the old days working for the vice squad had certain 'benefits', working porno and solicitation has certain 'benefits.'
Damn I'm cynical.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It has nothing to do with what's "higher profile." It has everything to do with jurisdiction and resources. A state-level law enforcement agency doesn't have the resources to travel over seas to go after the Russian/Chinese hackers and fraudsters. Even if you consider the much smaller percentage of "home grown" fraud - in most cases the victim is in a different state than the fraudster. Most of the criminals will directly target victims as far away from them as geographically possible because they know local law enforcement is cash and time strapped. Lastly, the police prioritize crimes based on how it affects the victim. Physical/emotional harm will ALWAYS trump financial loss. No agency I know of goes after IP violations. The FBI only goes after large organized crime groups that use warez as their money machine.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
...most incidences of online theft are under the magical felony number which makes an individual counts of fraud usually not worth pursuing.
I've had my ID stolen and used to exploit Household Bank's lax policies no fewer than 3 times by the same person, from the same address, in Chicago.
Each time the scumbag ran up just about $4900 then stopped using the account. At $5k it's a felony. They don't even bother sending the police to the guys shipping address because it's not enough for them to get a good case. I expect the next collection call any day now (looks at watch)... You'd think they'd flag my social security number and not give accounts to "me" any more. No they just hand out their money like it ain't no thang.
The people running that bank and working there are scumbags too. The last time around, Household's collector told my wife that I'm having an affair with someone in Chicago. Funny, since I've never been there and I'm home every night, in Maryland, where I live. My wife thought it was hilarious.
Oh well, it's their money I guess. It's kind of a pain in the ass when it happens, but I just tell them "Look you been robbed, again, by the same guy. You might want to flag my social security number and not give accounts to people using my information". Then I call the credit bureau, report the fraud and they take it off my report.
It's the banks causing the problem, not the police. The bank people are stupid. The retail people don't even bother asking for ID. I still can't believe the government is bailing banks out and preventing natural selection from doing it's thing.
This country's laws are written to promote theft and fraud, and our government supports and endorses stupidity. Fraud and socialism is what this country is all about.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Of course the authorities don't bother to prosecute online criminals, any more than most metro police departments bother to investigate non-violent property crimes nowadays. You have too many criminals and too few people available to hunt them down. The government gives priority to violent crime and high-profile pubic cases, and everything else falls by the wayside. On top of that, the government won't bother with crimes where no one (including the judge, jury, or prosecutor) can understand the facts of the case. Face it - online fraud is typically a non-violent crime where only small amounts of money are lost. The police have no more interest in hunting down online crooks than they do in finding the guy who broke into your car to steal the radio. They give you a police report, you file a claim with your insurance carrier, and that's that.
A slightly off-topic comment: Personally I have always believed that the perfect crime is to start a "free energy" company, and claim to be developing a device that violates the laws of physics. As long as you don't violate any securities laws, and hire some good attorneys to intimidate any of your investors who start to complain, you can rake in millions and no one can touch you. Nobody will understand the physics, and you can simply claim that you had problems with your R&D process that prevented commercialization of the product. Take a look at Randy Mills and Blacklight Power for a perfect example.
Umm, well in the cases of illegal porn they're most likely not targeting online babes, so more likely they'll be chatting we "fat dude in mom's basement pretending to be an online babe" while simultaneously posing as a 14-year-old talking to online pervs.
Doesn't really sound like all that much fun to me, and I *really* don't think that the pictures/porn traded in those situations is going to be all that pleasant.
Somehow the cops get better publicity for arresting someone for child porn than they do for busting the SOB that stole your grandmother's life savings.
Some years ago, before all porn moved to the internet, someone dumped some porn videos in the river. That led the cops to arrest someone and seize all his tapes. The police chief made a big deal of it. He said we needed a pornography task force. He said he needed more officers. He said he needed a much bigger budget. The trouble was that the vast majority of the tapes weren't porn. The vast porn ring the police chief warned about didn't exist. What we had was a sleeze bag police chief trying to feather his own nest. Maybe they teach that kind of behavior in police chief school.
When I lived in a different city, I studied with a guy who was convicted of child pornography. The judge deeply regretted, in his sentencing remarks, that he couldn't send the guy to jail for longer. OK, the guy was a bit pathetic but he sure wasn't a hardened criminal. If he'd just kept his mouth shut, he would never have been convicted. He was a easy mark and the cops got lots of lovely publicity for busting him. (I'm not saying I would be happy to have this guy within a mile of my kids but he didn't deserve the punishment he got. What he needed was some elementary dental work and some social skills so he could pick up adult women. Paying a dentist and a social worker would have been way cheaper than throwing him in the clink for a bunch of years.)
Chasing real criminals who pose a real danger to society is difficult and doesn't produce much positive reinforcement for the police. If I were a police chief, I'm not sure I would think it was worth the effort.
DAs need to get re-elected. It's all about high-profile grandstanding.
Oh.. and the person who stole the gun and laptop, they got busted for "possession of stolen property" instead of theft or anything like that. One served 6 months, the other had time served waiting for trial and they both got 5 years probation.
Arggggle!
Yes, I know the gun was likely cheaper than the laptop(this being /.). Still gun theft is a FELONY.
I might be a gun toting libertarian who's bugged various officials, but gun theft is one of the things I support coming down like a ton of bricks for.
Anyways, all this was possible because the local cops didn't go beyond "local" and didn't do anything more then what was absolutely necessary to get their salary.
Exactly. Here's the deal: Most petty crimes are committed by career petty criminals. You catch somebody shoplifting, odds are they've done it before. Same with any number of property crimes. They're doing it to make a living off of other people's backs or to feed a habit. That means that if you have an effective police and justice system, preventing them from doing it again can prevent dozens, even hundreds of crime.
Busting those 10 people probably had an appreciable effect on dropping the crime rate in the local area. It can be hard to understate this stuff.
So if a police department takes even petty crimes seriously, it can have some very good effects. First is the reduction in the crime rate - fewer petty crimes still reduce crime rates and insurance costs. Second is that you catch career headed criminals earlier, possibly before they start commiting felonies. Not to mention that being seen as effective helps the police department, and most people's experience with crime is the petty stuff. Oh, and on a side note effective policing/justice systems are the best way to prevent vigilante justice.
It's along the lines that yes, cleaning up graffeti and gang signs promptly can actually lead to a reduction in gang/youth crime.
Note: I think that the guy who stole your stuff far more deserves to be in prison than the guy who was just smoking/selling weed.
Online wise - I know there's some huge jurisdictional problems, because many of the scammers are overseas. I just think we could still do SOMETHING.
I don't read AC A human right
I recently had someone fraudulently use my credit card info to open accounts in my name on Netflix, Blockbuster.com, and Stamps.com. They were using identity theft to create sock puppet referrals to online services, then use those bogus referrals in one of those Transcendent Innovations promotions (free iPod, free PlayStation, or whatever).
The police took down my information and gave me a case number, but that was the extent of their investigation. The case was never assigned to anyone to actually work, and when I contacted them again to provide further details for my report, it was obvious that they didn't care.
I had an online scammer send me a forged money order, which I promptly delivered to the local police; Their response? "What should I do with this?" (AFTER I explained that it was a forged money order, as verified by the originating bank...
But then you'd get into an East coast/wWest coast pissing match over which one.
The logical thing would be to have it in the preferences, of course. Maybe it is in there. I don't know, because another logical thing worth doing would be to organise the preferences so you have a hope in hell of finding something.
At the bottom of the
Porn, you set up a kiddie porn front and nab the downloaders. Sit back for easy fishing. How do you effectively set up a site that says, "Over here, I'm a rube. Phish me! Fleece me! Pwn me!"
The RIAA is still running amok on publicly-funded networks, aren't they?
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
I'm a cyber/white collar crimes detective for a medium-sized agency. There are so many problems with online crimes right now that I don't even know where to start. But one of the most important things is that people realize some of the problems we face...
1) I know it's popular (especially on slashdot) to bitch about how "Big Brother" is always trying to violate your civil rights for fun. But I will tell you that the red tape is one of the biggest factors in why a lot of online crimes don't get solved. For nearly every online crime, the first step is sending out subpoenas to every company involved. In a fraud case, this means: banks and the company where the order took place. Then once you get those returns, you have to subpoena the ISP to find out what the physical address is. All of these companies take anywhere from a week to 3 months to get you the information back.
2) Once you get all your basic background work on the case done, now you have to physically drive to the address where the activity took place. You want to know what happens to 90% of my cases at the point? Dead end. The idiot has an unsecured wireless router, which means that anyone could have perpetrated the crime. And of course, anyone that is dumb enough to leave their wireless network wide open isn't smart enough to have turned on logging in their router (which is off by default in almost all routers).
3) OK so now what. No we try to look at where the item was shipped, assuming it was an online purchase. Guess what? Nobody ships it to their home address. They ship it to a neighbors, or an abandoned house down the street, or one of the thousands of "work from home repackaging" businesses. OK, so do I go to a judge and try to get a search warrant to search a house where a package was delivered just on the off chance that they were stupid enough to use their real address? NO I can't! Judges want more hard evidence than that.
4) In non-purchase fraud cases (i.e. a person is transferring money around), we follow the money trail just like we do with any other financial crime. Guess where I dead-end here? Stored Value Cards. Get one from overseas, and now they don't have to comply with my subpoena. Dead in the water again.
OK so those are some of the issues in investigating online crimes, specifically fraud cases. Wanna know what the biggest issue is after all of that? I just spent about 30 man-hours investigating that $500 fraud case. I contact the victim to let them know what's going on. They've already been reimbursed by the bank simply by making their initial police report. The bank doesn't give a shit because $500 is nothing to them and they get to turn it in to insurance as a loss.
These are some of the reasons that online crimes aren't getting solved. For every one that I make an arrest on, I have 10 that I've dead-ended on. Unless the credit card companies and banks decide to take a stand and make their financial methods more secured, they're going to continue losing money. So the original story says that only 40% of time is being spend on fraud cases. Yeah that's probably about right. Kiddy porn and child solicitation cases may not seem as serious to some people, but they're so much more cut and dry. That's like saying that more robberies are solved than burglaries... they're 2 entirely different crimes with different sets of parameters.
Is that "4 out of 5" as a synonym for "most" or is that a real statistic?
If it's real then I'm surprised that 1 out of 5 times it's actually real. That seems awfully high. I did a quick search and although
http://www.policemag.com/Articles/2008/06/False-Burglar-Alarms.aspx
indicates that it's a problem, it doesn't give any numbers.
Cow Cube
"A report by the Center for American Progress and the Center for Democracy and Technology"
do those agency names freak anyone else out? or am I just a fan of small government and privacy...
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
Because online criminals in the US are predominantly white. Why would we start prosecuting white people who can afford a computer? We're the US!!!
I don't think it was coincidental that the cops routinely check all pawn shops in the city and your stolen goods happen to show up at a pawn shop right outside the city limits.
Very true. Of course, the whole ID thing and entry of serial numbers into databases is because for a long time an alternative name for a pawn shop was 'fence'.
The clerk probably knew that they never got inquries about things stolen in the city. The clerk probably knew that even if you typo'd a serial noone ever complained about it.
Thus, the clerk was knowingly taking stolen goods, gaming the system - earning him prosecution under any anti-fence laws the state might have.
You messed up their system exactly because you went above and beyond what the cops would do.
Thus cops should, just like a good sports team or teacher, occasionally mix up their methods/procedures. Invent a new procedure(like sticking a GPS tracker on a suspect's vehicle), ressurect an old one, investigate a different angle. Go 'all out' on 1-10% of even petty crimes - the whole CSI bit. Why? That way you catch the crime rings.
I'm just saying that if they checked everything inside say state limits you can be pretty sure your goods would be in the next state over. It's not quite as easy as "If they'd only checked just outside the city..."
Especially with high gas prices, there's a limit as to how far you can take that DVD player, TV, or other random stolen good and still make enough money to cover the risk.
Believe it or not, at one point there was a thriving car theft ring that'd take their stolen cars down to Mexico to sell. On actual car hauler trucks like what they move new cars on.
BTW, I'm all for random people protecting their goods in interesting ways. Stick a GPS tracker in that old X-Box. Install tracking software on your laptop/computer. It's not 100% - won't work on the criminals smart enough to format the HD, but it'll work on many of them.
I don't read AC A human right
But the problem with this is that every country says: "Fuck it, it's someone else's problem, let them deal with it. Why should I investigate it just so they get to arrest the perpetrator?".
Don't forget that many of these criminals work in states more or less friendly to them. Nigeria, China, etc... Though China might be mostly due to sheer population.
In some countries, it does work pretty well though.
And these criminals get away free as birds.
Besides the hostile country problem, you also get countries where the department wants to be paid for their effort. At least in the USA, you might be able to get the FBI involved in a crime that crossed state lines, but once you go overseas you add a whole 'nother level of bureaucracy. Diplomats. Bleh. Do you try him in the country he commited the crime in, or in the country the victim was in? Is it even a crime in his country? Is it to the point we're willing to use special forces to express our displeasure? (Not likely)
Of course, I smoothed all this stuff over by the simple statement of 'huge jurisdictional problems'. ;)
I don't read AC A human right
... when they go after real world vice cases, the cops have to spend their time (and public money) working undercover, buying lap dances at the local strip joint.
Have gnu, will travel.
That is probable because so many officials are on the take to look the other way, that they are now left with a small corner of the room left to be able to "view" and the pedophiles didn't know how to hide that well...those cc fraudsters sure know how to pay them off good!
That's like taking Jessy Jackson seriously.
After working for the government for the last eight years in the capacity of "trying to catch the bad guys", I can tell the real reason the offenders don't get caught is because of two things. One the lack of talent that law enforcement has is disgracefully low. The talent pool is defiantly a puddle at best. The other is the simple fact that pursuing offenders requires motivation and pro-activity both of which is almost nonresistant. So I'm truly sorry to say help us all if something truly bad ever happens in the cyberspace arena.
You know, the ones labeled by their corporate masters.
The problem is, they'd rather criminalize the non-criminals by making everything online illegal, such as file sharing, and even trolling. while things like identity theft and credit card trading go unhindered.
Yup, and spending too little time prosecuting corrupt administration officials too.
But hey, what can you do?
(Oh yeah, I forgot, vote.)