posted on August 27, 2004 08:37:28 AM newOperation Web Snare...150,000 victims identified -- Ashcroft nabs about 150 people.
WASHINGTON The Justice Department has announced that more than 150 people have been arrested, charged or convicted in the past three months in a crackdown on criminal activity on the Internet. The cases, involving credit card fraud, corporate espionage and other offenses, are part of what the department called Operation Web Snare.
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The sweep was conducted by 37 offices of the FBI, 13 divisions of the Postal Inspection Service and other federal and local agencies. Investigators have identified more than 150,000 victims of Internet crime with losses totaling more than $215 million.
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"This is a series of cases that is designed to signal that we do not believe the Internet to be off base for law enforcement," Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference on Thursday.
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Some cases involved the sending of junk e-mail, known as spam, and a form of online identity theft known as phishing. But many of them involved use of the Internet by companies seeking an advantage over competitors.
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In one unusual case, the chief executive of a company that resold satellite television systems was indicted on charges of hiring hackers to set up online attacks that interfered with rivals' Web sites. The executive, Jay Echouafni of Orbit Communication, is said to have left the country and is being pursued in what the department called "an international manhunt led by the FBI."
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In another case cited by the Justice Department, Robert McKimmey, who was identified as the chief technology officer of Business Engine, pleaded guilty in federal court in San Francisco in July to charges of stealing trade secrets from a rival software company, Niku, by breaking into its computers.
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EBay, the online auction site, continued to be a fertile ground for fraud, the department said. In one case it described, a California man named Jie Dong built a record of satisfied customers, reflected in the widely used "feedback" ratings on the site, by selling $150,000 of merchandise at low prices, according to a criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles last week. But last autumn, he allegedly sold $800,000 of goods, like DVD players and digital cameras, to 5,000 people and never delivered the products. He, too, is said to have fled the country, but the government says it has located and frozen $280,000 that it says are stolen funds.
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Packaging a variety of disparate cases as a "sweep" has a number of beneficial effects for a law enforcement agency, said Paul Luehr, a former official of the Federal Trade Commission and now a vice president of Stroz Friedberg, a consulting firm. Luehr said it was notable that so many of the cases that the Justice Department had highlighted involved the cooperation of law enforcement agencies overseas. Many Internet crimes involve webs of people and machines around the globe, and it has often been difficult for American authorities to get their overseas counterparts to cooperate.
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At the news conference, Ashcroft mentioned cooperation with Nigeria, which has been the source of a number of e-mail-based scams. The best-known of these are e-mail messages that claim to be from deposed African leaders or their family members, offering large sums of money as a lure to get bank account information from the victim.
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Ibrahim Lamorde, the director of operations for Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, talked of training, assistance and software that his organization had received from the FBI and other U.S. sources. This helped in arresting and charging some fraud perpetrators, he said.
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But he also said that some of the assistance did not suit Nigeria's needs. "Most of the software we receive is meant to stop people from receiving e-mail," he said. "We want to stop e-mail from going out of the country."
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http://www.iht.com/articles/536061.html
posted on August 27, 2004 12:19:30 PM new
lol parklane! It crossed my mind the other day, say a party was so devious as to want to steal this election so bad.......What would stop them from 'performing' for lack of a better word some identity theft and them sending people out to register/vote in different jurisdictions with the fake id's??
Ok, so maybe I've read one too many John Grisham or james patterson novels, but in theory could it be done like that? Is it cause for concern with electronic voting?
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~~ Keep thy heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues(forces)of life..Proverbs 4:23~~
