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A bleak picture of an explosion of fraud thanks to computers and the internet was painted by Rosalind Wright, Director of the Serious Fraud Office.
A bleak picture of an explosion of fraud thanks to computers and the internet was painted by Rosalind Wright, Director of the Serious Fraud Office. The sheer scale of targeting crimes simultaneously committed in different countries from an often unknown source brings law enforcement problems, she said at the second annual ICC-Commercial Crime Services Lecture, on 21st Century Fraud, at the Stationers Hall in London in mid-May. She denied that the Internet is unregulated and unpoliceable but said: ?Fraud committed with the aid of Internet dealing only exacerbates the problems, adding new tools to the fraudster?s armory and amplifying its effect on victims. The Internet already has 300 million users worldwide and is expected to account for an estimated $1,300 billion in trade by 2003. The problems it presents apply to traditional frauds that have been reworked to take advantage of the new technology, just as much as to the new types of fraud currently being developed.? The European Union has proposed a ?Cybercrime Convention? for approval by the end of 2001, which will require signatory states to pass laws regarding data interference, computer-related fraud and forgery, child pornography, search and seizure of data and systems, and other related matters. E-mail re-registration fraud is also a growing problem particular to the internet, she said. Customers at one American online bank recently received an email supposedly from the bank saying that some of their details had been lost due to an archive problem. Because it was serious about security it had no spare copies and asked the customer very nicely to re-register. A thoughtful link direct to the bank?s site was provided on the message to make things easier. The link was to the fraudster?s site, a faithful copy of the bank?s, and an astounding 250,000 customers fell for the scam and dutifully and unwittingly gave their bank details to criminals, something they would have been unlikely to do if the request had come in in the post. The problem of mimic bank sites is growing. Only last month the ICC Commercial Crime Bureau foiled an Internet banking scam that attracted advance fees to provide a range of high value bank and financial institution guarantees with a face value of millions of dollars. The sites used were almost identical replicas of Euroclear Bank, the international clearing system for the settlement of transactions in securities and Eurobonds, and Bloomberg, the information services provider. In fact they were provided by a free Internet service provider in Utah, USA. Digital signatures are a relatively new form of electronic trade facility that only became legally effective in England and Wales last year. They enable two parties who have never met, other than through a website, to trust each other in the same way as if they had signed a paper contract. No cases of digital signatures being used to commit fraud have been recorded yet, but Mrs Wright will not be surprised when it happens.
ICC-Commercial Crime Services (CCS) is the anti-crime arm of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris: it shields companies from a wide range of crimes affecting business, carries out investigations and helps victims to recover losses. It has four divisions: ICC-International Maritime Bureau (IMB), ICC-Commercial Crime Bureau (CCB), ICC-Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau (CIB) and the Cybercrime Unit.
Some jurisdictions that are not as willing as they might be to assist law enforcers by providing information that could speed up the judicial process, she claimed: ?Victims currently encounter a jurisdictional quagmire, as it is unlikely to be clear which country?s laws apply. They want to know that when things go wrong, there is an efficient, speedy and inexpensive means of redress. The problem for law enforcement is to identify the perpetrators, to obtain sufficient evidence to support charges and then to ensure that the jurisdiction where they are to be prosecuted does indeed have the locus to try them. Yet many continental jurisdictions do not recognise private sector corruption as a crime, and 11 of the 15 member states of the EU still will not extradite their own nationals abroad. Other jurisdictions don?t answer letters seeking information or have judicial processes that delay the transmission of information, sometimes until the trial is over. Visit www.icc-ccs.org.
