FBI takes online rip-offs to task

Beverley Head
Thursday, 25 November 2010 17:52

Business IT - Security

Australians taking advantage of the strong $A to shop online for goods and services rely heavily on the bona fides of online suppliers - if you're ripped off there's little to do apart from seethe silently and flame constantly. But the FBI's interested if it was a US site or citizen that did the ripping off.

Lodging a complaint on the Internet Crime Complaint Centre, a joint initiative of the FBI and National White Collar Crime Authority, can help identify patterns of dodgy behaviour and ultimately lead to FBI action.

Will Blevins, an FBI legal attaché, who is now based in Canberra spoke at an e-crime conference in Sydney, and explained that this was one of a series of initiatives undertaken by the FBI to crack down on computer crime. He said that if someone had, for example, paid $100 online for a camera which never arrived, it was too small an issue for the FBI to tackle.

'But if they are doing it to 100,000 people then the site aggregates those small losses and it will attract our attention and could lead to a case,' said Mr Blevins. The internet crime complaint centre at www.ic3.gov allowed people to register their concerns he said.

It's one of a series of actions that the FBI is taking to crack down on computer crime. The Bureau also has a Facebook page, is on Twitter and YouTube, and also runs a series of 'most wanted' billboards on Second Life.

Mr Blevins said that the FBI also sponsored an information website called lookstoogoodtobetrue.com which was intended to alert people to online scams.

The Bureau now has cyber crime agents posted in all of its 56 US field offices and has identified a priority list of cyber crimes that it aims to combat. The top four on that list are illegal computer intrusions (counter terrorism, counter intelligence and criminal); online child exploitation; intellectual property theft and identify theft.