[Ti] Powerbook scamming the scammer

[Tarik Bilgin]

On 18 May 2004, at 15:45, Ritz, Daniel wrote:

> Watch for new sellers with little feedback... and use escrow!!

Taking a step back, it's not that people who fall for the scams are 
actually "stupid" but that we are still learning about "how to do 
business on the internet".

In real life transactions we have many defense mechanisms which monitor 
for suspicious activity and take action. Just think about how you 
conduct business when someone comes to your house to pay for an ebay 
auction: You count the money, he has your address, cheques are frowned 
upon as they can bounce, etc.

On the internet verification of identity is the hardest problem of all, 
and from that stem a lot of the possible vectors for fraud. A "trusted 
third party" (e.g. a well regarded and insured escrow agency) can be a 
very good defense against such attacks, so your advice is well given, 
Daniel.

One final note about internet scamming. There are so many scams, 
hacking incidents, denial of service attacks, viruses and so on, that 
law enforcement agents (at the high-tech crime unit in the UK, for 
example) have more cases that they can shake a stick at. They are 
aggressively prioritising them and so many get rejected.

However in your example things are not so bleak. $2000 worth of goods 
was taken from you by deception, and your local (i.e. not the FBI) 
police force may be interested in investigating it. However, if the 
case is cross-border (in your example US-Canada) it may be very 
difficult to get cooperation from the other countries' police force to 
actually prosecute.

There is a silver-lining though. The Cybercrime treaty signed in 
Budapest 2000 (by many countries)  sought to address this (and many 
other problems) and USA and Canada are both signed up to it (and have 
implemented special police forces to deal with such crimes).

My suggestion is if this happens to you, contact your local police 
force, and have a frank discussion with them about your case. If you 
have good evidence, and they believe that this scam might be part of a 
larger operation of organized criminals they may pursue it further. If 
not; well at least you tried.

Too many crimes of this nature go unreported, so I urge all victims of 
scams to report these incidents to the relevant authority (and be 
prepared to hand over documentation of the emails etc.) to help them. 
Having spoken to several of the senior police inspectors at the UK 
high-tech crime unit, I know that this is how they feel about the 
situation. You never know, they might actually find your case worth 
investigating.

--
Tarik