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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."
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
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.
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)
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.