Theft On-Line:
Real World Crimes Committed
Behind the Desktop
By: Victoria Williams
Introduction
Theft is committed everyday, from a pick-pocket walking down the street to a CEO embezzling millions of dollars through his company. The newest theft, via the internet, has become the ultra easy, super fast, completely incognito way of committing crimes. Theft over the internet comes in many forms. Intellectual property theft and various scams are types of crimes that can be engaged in on-line. The greatest gift the internet has to offer anyone is anonymity, being able to hide behind the keyboard and the mouse is enough to tempt a person that might not otherwise have the nerve to attempt a crime. The internet makes way for a new form of masked robbery. Property theft can be very damaging, costly and extremely time consuming for not only the victims, but for society as a whole.
Intellectual Property Theft
As defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, intellectual property is any creative, technical, and intellectual product. Intellectual property theft can take on three forms, as suggested by the FBI, copyright violations, trademark infringement violations, and theft of trade secrets. The FBI found that intellectual property theft is very costly to the United States, with businesses losing $250 billion dollars a year, as it holds 5% of the countries gross domestic product and is one of the leading exports. The United States is not the only global area taking a hit from IP theft, also showing damage is areas such as Asia, the second hardest hit, and the United Kingdom, losing billions of pounds each year.
According to Wired Safety, copyright laws only pertain to original works of authorship, including music, text, graphics, illustrations, photographs, designs, multimedia content, and software. There is a major battle ensuing between the RIAA and peer-to-peer sharers that involves copyright infringement. P2P sharers are using the internet to transfer files to one another and the RIAA finally stepped up and decided to put a stop to this type of copyright violation with the intention of sending a clear message that the misuse of the internet to download music in this manner, when there are plenty of legal online music services, will result in a possible lawsuit and have its penalties. The creating and use of pirated software is another infringement of the copyright law. Referred to as software piracy, this is any misuse of illegally copied software as suggested by ealaddin.com. There are many types of software piracy; a list presented by Dan Vekhter and Jim Peng of Stanford gives a few examples: Shoplifting or Shoploading is considered the most common type (using the software against the licensed agreement or that is not allowed by the agreement); Hard Disk Loading, which is used by dealers for the most part to make a computer more attractive to the buyer by loading an illegal version of software on the computer at no cost; Renting is just what it is, renting out a version of software without the knowledge and permission of the owner of the copyright. Yet another type of copyright violation is plagiarism, or, according to Indiana University, the use of another persons thoughts and words without properly giving that person credit. College students seem tempted to pass other peoples work off as their own; many cases are evidence of this as displayed by Dr. Ronald B. Standler. Dr. Standler presents cases where people which have earned a Ph.D. have had them taken away when it was found out most of their work was plagiarized. Copyright violations appear everywhere on the internet, just type in any word, or so it seems, and you can find examples of someone going against copy protection.
A trademark, in a definition offered by WIPO, is a mark that lets other people know that a certain good is made by a person or company. This leads into the next topic of intellectual property theft, trademark infringement. Software piracy has a place in trademark infringement just as it has in copyright violations, as one type of piracy known as counterfeiting entails the making of false software and packaging it to appear to be the trademarked item according to Vekhter and Peng (this is how Windows applications by Microsoft are often pirated). Another possible source of trademark infringement is the selling of false goods over sites such as EBay and Amazon. Ina Steiner discusses such a case in her article, David versus Goliath: eBay Sellers Take on Corporate America, she presents the case of two people who were being sued over trademark infringement by companies such as Disney and Major League Baseball. Though the couple was never charged, it still brings up the valid issue of trademark crimes on auction sites where goods can be easily misrepresented.
Intellectual Property crimes can also involve the divulging of trade secrets. Attorney Eric S. Freibrun, Esq. gives information to the fact that a recipe for something such as KFCs fried chicken or the source code to Microsoft XP are both examples of trade secrets. Though internet users are subject to many spoofs intending to provide trade secrets such as the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe hoax, the availability to trade secrets is very much a reality. Recently, the public was presented, online, with part of the source code for Windows 2000 and Windows NT4.0 according to the Associated Press. The IHT Online gives a brief, yet descriptive, definition of a source code as presented by Microsoft, which can also apply to trade secrets, as a blueprint. The leak could inform hackers of ways into the system allowing access to anyones computer, or could even give other software companies an insight in to what makes Microsoft the software giant it is as suggested by the IHT Online article. Pauline Reich of Waseda University School of Law in Tokyo, Japan, instills fear into companies of the use of email and possible leaks of trade secrets as introduced in the article The Brave New World of Internet Law written by Robyn Weisman. Reich also instills the same fear into employees that a possible agreement will have to be met that may allow the company to monitor all incomeing and outgoing mail for possible leaks. In most of the articles read in research of trade secrets, the employees were the main culprits of the divulging of information. With the ease of the internet and the quick click of the send button, any information, secret or not, can be sent from an office computer to a personal computer in the blink of an eye.
When people take other peoples ideas, words, and goods and pass them off as their own (in the case of copyright violations and trademark infrengment) it takes away the willingness of others and shows a lack of willingness in some to present their own ideas. As people tend to gossip and tell secrets, and espcially those as large as trade secrets, trust issues are violated and broken down. Society then becomes a distrustful world full of more and more laws which unfortuanaly trespass on the rights of those who do not participate in these heinous acts. In this respect, intellectual property theft not only can bring repercussions towards the theif, but seems to do more damage to everyone else.
Internet Scams
Internet scams come in many shapes and sizes. Victims can be scamed out of money, merchandise, and even their own identities. Scams seen on the internet include phishing, pyramid scams, and auction fraud. Many of the internet scams that are floating around look so legitimate that many unsupecting victims fall prey to them according to Mat Bright. Susan Grant, the Vice President for public policy and the Director of the National Fraud Information Center, feels that the internet is such a breeding ground for scams because anyone can create a flashy website and makes it possible to mass communicate via email. There are no borders to cross on the internet, a person in England can steal from a person in the United States with the ease of a mouse click. There is also little to no effort to be exerted, just the thought of what scam to produce. There is no walking into a bank and holding them up for maybe a few thousand dollars, now it seems people are willingly sending the scammers their hard earned money.
Phishing, in a summarized version of the definition provided by the Federal Trade Commision, is spam and websites created for the sole purpose of scamming people into divulging identifying information that is then used to fraudulently buy goods or gain credit. The FBI feels that phishing is the best new scam that is present on the internet and is an ideal way for someone to commit identity theft. A newsletter sent out by ScamBusters offers examples of emails phishing for information, they can appear to be from banks, department stores, or even online auction sites. Any place that holds important account information is subject to being used in one of these scams. According to ScamBusters the emails will indicate that there is possible fraud or claim that a purchase has been made on an account and the company being falsely represented needs to verify that the owner of the account did indeed make those purchases. The emails will go on to say that with a little information (credit card numbers, social security numbers, or checking acount numbers) the transaction or fraud can be verified. The victim will then provide these numbers, falling right into the trap. Identity theft, not limited to being just a result of phishing, is a very large problem for the society. Robert Cringely, in his article How to Steal $65 Billion: Why Identity Theft is a Growth Industry, reports that measuring identity theft is not an exact science. There is about 250,000 to 750,000 identity thefts per year with billions of dollars lost to society as a whole. Cringely suggests that the combination of idnetity theft and the internet is a very lethal one. Phishing seems to be a very costly and very convincing scam.
The pyramid scam is another inticing scam that people are lured into with the possibility of making money. The shape of the operation is that of a pyramid, strating with a single person, then gaining a force below them each contributing money to gain the possibility of making money as suggested by the Skeptics Dictionary. Feds Topple Net Pyramid Scams, an article written by Helen Vozenilek, states, Hucksters have been using the Internet to propagate too-good-to-be-true marketing opportunities that are, in fact, too good to be true. Vozenilek identifies two types of pyramid scams, the first includes exchanging money, including chain emails that say to send money to the person before, and the second has to do with reselling goods, buying them at wholesale and resleeing them at resale to make more money, the more people recruited under each person, the more money the people at the top make. In a consumer alert, the Federal Trade Commision warns that the majority of the people being roped into to multilevel marketing plans or pyramid scams more often are at a loss when it comes to money. According to the FTC, there are those which get lucky and do make money, but more people have to lose money for the fortunate ones to make it. The unfortunate people anly have merchandise they were scammed into buying or depleted bank accounts to show for their business ventures, as suggested by the allert put out by the FTC. The bottom line it, pyramid deals are a gamble, a person might have a better chance at winning the lottery than getting rich off of this get-rish-quick scheme.
At the top of the list circulated by the National Consumers League's Internet Fraud Watch for internet scams is auction fraud. In this report, auction fraud accounted for $3.2 million in losses that were reported and eighty-seven percent of the total internet scams being commited in 1999. The National Consumer League defines auction fraud as items bid for but never delivered by the sellers, value of items inflated, shills suspected of driving up bids, prices hiked after highest bids accepted, but it also can include scammers buying high dollar goods and paying with fraudulent checks or money orders (known from personal experience) or the interest in the auction generating solicitations for false goods. A list of types of internet auction fraud offered by Lyndaroxanne.com includes sellers not delivering, bidders not paying, shill bidding, feed back fraud and bombing, the over charging on shipping, and false descriptions of goods. Bob Sullivan, a technology correspondent for MSNBC, reports of new sellers on sites such as eBay offering high dollar items for sale and when the bidding is done, not delivering what was implied in the description of the item. According to eBay, shill bidding is placing bids on an item to fraudulently drive up the price. Another trick used on eBay is that of feedback fraud or shill feedback. This includes the use of other eBay members or false eBay names to boost the ratings of a sellers feedback to make them seem more reliable. Another type of auction fraud includes false payments of goods or the Nigerian Auction Scam. The Nigerian Auction Scam, as introduced by Chuck Rupnow, consists of representative in Nigeria over paying for a high dollar good purchased over the internet. The scammer sends a fraudulent cashiers check for well over the amount of the item and asks the victim to send the remaining money back to Nigeria. If the victim falls prey to this, they will soon find out that the check was of no worth and they were just fooled by the growing Nigerian Scam. In banking (being a teller myself), it is unfortunate to see this happen, but it does. One such case that failed, due to sharp, eyes was a young man walked into a bank with a cashiers check that was fake that was intended for the purchase of a piece of computer equipment he was selling. He told the story, when questioned about the check, of how he was selling computer equipment over the internet and had an offer from a man in Nigeria. He brought the check in due to it being drawn on the bank and found out it was not a good check. He had not sent any money or the goods that he was selling back to the bidder, he was lucky. One final auction scam is using auctions to generate outside scams. One such case was an IPod scam, according to Wired News, where the bidder gets unsolicited email after bidding on an IPod on eBay. This scam is similar to pyramid scams, it offers free or discounted goods in return for buying other goods and having all your friends sign up for the same offers. Auction fraud comes in many forms, but not only are users of the sites fighting it, the sites, such as eBay, are hard on the trail of the scammers that frequent the auctions.
Conclusion
It is obvious that scams are everywhere; the internet is no exception to the rule. Cyber space is an infinite world, people are coming up with new ideas, and unfortunately, new scams everyday. Even the most frequent user of the internet can be taken into seemingly real places to conduct what appears to be legitimate business. The crooks are finding innovative ways to con people out of their money, and with the use of the cyber realm their scams are becoming easier to pull off. Kristina Stefanova offers advise in her article, Scammers find cyber-loopholes: the Internet has made it easier for criminals to trick consumers into giving out sensitive personal data, consumers face many challenges when conducting business on line, but following safety precautions and being aware of privacy policies, society can continue to do business as usual.
