Feds Move To 'Slam Spam'
The Justice Department is set to announce a major crackdown on cyber-crime that will include arrests, subpoenas and property seizures of alleged e-mail spammers and online scam artists, law enforcement and industry sources told two major newspapers.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft had scheduled a news conference for Thursday.
On Wednesday, he announced the execution of seemingly unrelated search warrants in Texas, New York and Wisconsin on five residences and one Internet service provider in connection with file sharing. Operation Digital Gridlock was investigating five peer-to-peer networks allegedly engaging the distribution of copyright-protected materials such as movies, music, software and games.
"P2P, or peer-to-peer, does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,'" Ashcroft said, describing it as "the first federal enforcement ever taken against criminal copyright theft."
The New York Times reports that federal and state law enforcement agencies already have quietly arrested or charged dozens of people with crimes related to junk e-mail, identity theft and other online scams in recent weeks.
More than half the cases focus on online scams, especially "phishing," an increasingly common tactic in which computer users receive e-mails that look as if they are from banks or other legitimate businesses but are used to induce people to provide credit card numbers or other personal information, reported The Washington Post.
Other cases involve the continuing onslaught of traditional spam, which can include pornography, fraudulent diet schemes or bogus body-organ enhancement drugs. Spam also has become a primary delivery system for viruses that can either disable a machine, expose private data or turn a computer into a "zombie" that can be controlled by a hacker to launch more spam.
Because the enforcement actions are ongoing, FBI officials declined to provide details, but a trade group acknowledged the press reports.
"It's a large number of cases," said H. Robert Wientzen, former president of the Direct Marketing Association, an organization that has put up $500,000 to assist law enforcement in tracking down the most notorious spammers.
"We want spammers to realize that spam is not a free game for them and that they face real penalties if they continue," he said.
The FBI, with help from the DMA, launched Operation Slam Spam a year ago, with technical operations at a field office in Pennsylvania. Wientzen said his organization provided financial and technical help.
The actions to be announced Thursday will be the first fruits of the effort, though it is unclear how many of the cases involve formal charges or indictments.
But Wientzen said he expects a second round of actions in the fall.
Spam, which accounts for as much as 70 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States, has by some estimates cost businesses and consumers as much as $10 billion a year. The percentage of spam in e-mail has increased about 10 percent since Congress passed a law criminalizing fraudulent and deceptive e-mail practices.
Phishing, a newer phenomenon, has zoomed up the charts of Internet crime. In the past year, transactions carried out after phishing scams cost banks and credit card companies an estimated $1.2 billion.
In May of this year alone, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry consortium, more than 1,100 new scams were launched.
According to the research firm Gartner Inc., an estimated 57 million adults in the United States had received a phishing e-mail as of May.
Usually, the bogus e-mail looks as if it came from a bank, payment service or vendor such as eBay, claiming that account information, passwords or credit card numbers need to be verified. Often, they threaten to discontinue service if the information is not provided.
Users are directed to a phony Web site designed to look official, where they can enter the information requested. Computer experts advise consumers never to respond to such solicitations.
Nearly two dozen investigators worked on the cases from an office in Pittsburgh operated by the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, a nonprofit organization with close ties to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The investigative team included both federal agents and executives from businesses that do business on the Internet.
Although law enforcement has been slow to take an interest in spam, the agencies are becoming more aggressive as the volume increases and the messages more often are being used to perpetrate other crimes, such as identity theft and credit card fraud.