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US Failing To Prosecute Online Criminals
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Aug 14, 2008 06:59 AM
from the get-out-of-jail-free dept.
from the get-out-of-jail-free dept.
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."
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Slashdot is just as bad ... (Score:4, Funny)
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They get eaten by grues.
Can anyone comment on "The Center for American Progress" and "The Center for Democracy and Technology" I've never heard of them before and they sound like the sort of names church groups give themselves when they want to sound credible.
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ITYM "Minstry of peace".
Minipax makes war.
Minitrue lies.
Miniluv kicks your face in
Miniplenty makes sure you don't have enough to eat.
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Can anyone comment on "The Center for American Progress" and "The Center for Democracy and Technology" I've never heard of them before and they sound like the sort of names church groups give themselves when they want to sound credible.
There's a lot of think tanks and policy advocate groups with high minded names.
Some of them are more descriptive than others.
http://www.americanprogress.org/aboutus [americanprogress.org] (2003)
"Founded in 2003, CAP is headed by John D. Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and professor at the Georgetown University Center of Law. CAP is designed to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement. Our ability to develop thoughtful policy proposals and engage in the war of ideas with conserv
Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
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And in keeping with the point of this article, copyright infringement can be prosecuted criminally as well. And it very rarely is.
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As another poster pointed out, the RIAA and downloading cases are civil cases not criminal like the ones in the article. This means that the government isn't taking them up, who ever was infringed apon or represent those entities are.
But I like the Hate America First attitude in your post.
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Well duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) High Profile
2) a large corporation
Then you have little hope of ever getting anything back. Prosecutors just dont care about anything that wont get them a DA job or better and even if thousands or hundreds of thousands are stolen, a kiddie porn or murder case trumps all even if the money stolen ruins the person just the same.
Parent
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
* 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.
Yeah, but they still understand "he stole $10 million" just fine. Additionally, there's the whole 'fear of the unknown' thing. Remember Mitnick getting solitary because they were afraid he could whistle 9600 baud into a payphone, hack the computers controlling nukes, and start WWIII?
Also, people are paranoid of identity theft. Don't use tech jargon, the prosecutor only has to explain to the public that some dirtbag stole the identities of 200,000 people or whatever. Identity theft is enough of a perceived threat that Visa and other card companies use it in commercials.
I think if it's broken down simply enough, the public will certainly understand.
Parent
Hmmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Not just online... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Not just online... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I have a cop friend who works day and he says the same thing about Alarm systems. They are pretty much worthless except for letting people at home know when their perimeter has been breached. Reason cops don't care about alarms is 4 out of 5 times, it's a false alarm. Kid forgets to shut it off. Dog jumped up at something and set off motion detectors, high wind jiggled loose a door that wasn't properly closed. So unlike the ads ADT shows, cops don't run lights and sirens, they just drive over and check it out at their leisure.
Parent
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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.
Most of the time it would imply that noone saw the person(s) in question, often they don't know exactly when it was committed and even if you could put a suspect near the crime scene it's tough to prove it's your man. I'm sure we'd love to see CSI put on their ass but they're nowhere nearly as effective as on TV and extremely expensive. With alarms there's at least a chance there'll be a free police patrol nearby, adding some risk into it. Better locks might take them longer to get through, as would solid d
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You're right, often there just isn't enough evidence. But when the person has the serial numbers of the stolen stuff, and it shows up in a local pawnshop, who HAS the ID of the seller, what's preventing them from following up at that point?
When the dude with the stolen laptop manages to track it down, going so far as to hand the police an ADDRESS.
Sure, there's lots of petty criminals. I figure that if we were more effective at catching them for a while, there'd quickly be a lot less of them.
Re:Not just online... (Score:5, Interesting)
Your point on a local pawn shop is something that struck a nerve with me. I had a laptop and a gun among other things stolen from a van. There are 5 pawn shops in the county and the cops only checked the ones within the city limits. In my state, there is a pawn card submitted to the police detailing the pawned item and the identity of whoever sold/pawned it. But there is no central database or anything making sure that any serial numbers would be accurate or anything.
I actually found my gun, a Dan Wesson .357 magnum sitting in a pawn show just outside the city limits and called the sheriff which should have also had a copy of the theft report. Evidently, the pawn shop entered the serial number wrong on accident but I have my suspicions on that. When I was phoning the sheriff the clerk attempted to take the gun into the back room to make it disappear as if he knew it was stolen. I practically got into a fight with him to keep it out in the open until the law could show up. They ran the numbers and I got it back after they did ballistics tests on it for some reason. The cop wasn't interested in the fact that they didn't report the correct serial number or that the clerk was attempting to remove the gun.
I later found some 2 way FRS radios in a pawnshop inside the city limits that looked like mine. I purchased them as a replacement only to find that they were mine when I was recording the serial numbers. They claimed they did a merchandise swap with the other pawn shop to keep fresh martial in stock. Again, the cop wasn't interested in any details. I went to the state AGs office which lit some fires under the right asses someone from the state was investigating the claims. About 4 months later, My laptop was returned in a broken and unrepairable state- the pawn shop listed the serial number on the battery to get around any obvious number. Evidently, the clerk was buying known stolen merchandise and fudging around with the numbers in order to prevent being discovered. They busted around 10 other people who were stealing the things.
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. 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.
Your right, there should be ways to catch these people. But at least in my experience, they assign those to the least productive member of the force. For all I know, that cop could have been in on the burglary ring and fencing operation but I'm just throwing that out with no proof or anything. I'm Just talking from a gut feeling on how this could happen.
Parent
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Probably the ballistics tests were done because it's not unlikely a stolen gun might have been used in a crime between the time it was stolen and the time it was pawned. I'm surprised you got it back at all... in some places it would have been held as "evidence" until it vanished.
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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.
That is why we humans, in a fit of brilliance, decided to create something known as the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol). To pass on the evidence, and let other countries deal with it.
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?". And these criminals get away free as birds.
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:5, Informative)
And it's not just "minor" stuff like phishing or spamming, or scamming people with "nigerian" mails that's riskfree, I've had a few cases were we or our customers reported people who used stolen creditcards, people who were traceable since they were stupid enough to use their own home connection (in other words, I had their real IP-address and logs with timestamps)... and the police (in Sweden) basically said "sorry, we don't have the time, manpower or competence to do anything".
Parent
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Maybe it's time to get a new job and offer some "cleaning" services.
I just have to buy some large buckets and fast-setting concrete first.
Look on the bright side! (Score:5, Funny)
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If it were possible to smoke pot on the internet(thc/ip?) we would be wasting most of our time prosecuting that.
Posting to slashdot is about as harmful to productivity but I won't tell the narcs if you won't.
Go get them... (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
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And then see a hundred slashdot posts insisting that a) it's all Microsoft and/or the user's fault for allowing/installing malware, b) that the young malware creator is just a precocious geek, and companies should hire them for being such brilliant malware creators.
which would you prefer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spend your day looking at smut or crawling through log files for dodgy transactions?
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Re:which would you prefer to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats because we really need to change name of our country so we can use the more appropriate three letter abbreviation: CYA.
Think TSA security. Why do we have a DHS? Its not because we know we need all this security. Very rational and well informed analysis has been done thats shown that we probably need NO increase in security at airports since 9/11.
What it comes down to is this: If you are a politician who has to be elected every 2-4 years or so, you know that if you oppose funding even the fakest of security measures (like creation of the DHS), and there is an attack, then you are going to have to "answer for" being the guy who opposed protection.
If you vote for it, you can fall back on "we did all we could". If you don't, then you are screwed because you "did nothing". Now... is a person who is in that situation of literally risking their jobs for not "looking tough" is the person who SHOULD be in charge of budget decisions?
Look at judges. In many places they are elected. So, if they let some guy off, and he goes out and rapes a child, guess who isn't getting re-elected?
Now... do you think that if you are standing in court, do you want to have your fate decided by a guy whose very job could be lost if he goes too easy on you? Of course, "man wrongly jailed" gets some ire up, but it seldom gets anyone, much less judges, tossed out in elections.
Never mind an innocent man, how about a guy who is guilty of making a stupid mistake that looks worst than it was (like someone who was caught taking a piss in an alleyway by a mother and her kid, and is then charged with exposing himself to a child)... seriously... do you expect a judge to risk his job going easy on you?
Its sad that we have made justice such a game. I know they say lovers of sausage and law should watch the creation of neither, but, man.... how can people know whats going on and still have ANY respect left for this system?
-Steve
Parent
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Start with some known criminals (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me when Sony have been prosecuted [wikipedia.org] for the crime [wikipedia.org] of contravening the Computer Misuse Act [wikipedia.org] in my country... and maybe then I'll care.
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You forget the United States is owned and operated by media companies.
Big Fish (Score:2)
Here's part of it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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It get's too seperated out.
The police just want to meet their quota for arrests without getting in trouble for really blatant wrongful arrests.
The prosecutor is expected to try his hardest for a conviction even if it's clear to him looking at the evidence that he's got that the defendant is innocent.
The judge is supposed to be the one who is impartial and decideds but at the same time isn't really required to understand the crime or how it was commited so crimes which involve technology or hard to understan
No great mystery why (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Online babes? (Score:2)
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.
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"Napoleon, don't be jealous because I've been talking to hot babes on the internet all day."
It isn't about "high profile" (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are a few other considerations to make:
First, most of our laws were written well before the advent of the internet, and determining how to apply them wisely in contexts that they were never designed for is difficult for even the best judicial minds.
Second, of those laws written with the internet in mind, nearly all were heavily influenced by politics and corporate interest, and are either ineffectual or biased.
Third, there is a difficult time applying the US Federal Rules of Evidence [cornell.edu] as regards expert
Probably because... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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
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Identity theft with criminal intent should be a capital crime...
Yes - flaimebait, but it will sure stop them from repeating...
No surprises here (Score:2)
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
Cops do what we reward them for (Score:2, Insightful)
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 majori
I've been waiting for a story like this... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually probably not.
Studies of how people actually determine whether or not to commit a crime show pretty definitively that it is NOT the severity of punishment but the likelyhood of being caught that factors into peoples decisions.
Thats not to say that increased penalties don't decrease crime, just that the effects are utterly dwarfed by increasing the chance of being caught.
One great example is car theft. An independant study found that a mere 1% increase in lojack sales corresponds to as much as a 20%