News - Police discover Internet - launch e-crime strategy

[HEXUS]

England's police association lays out its approach to online crime, but it's immediately condemned as too little, too late.

Read more.

[Jay]

Give them a break, its only 20 years too late!

[Shooty*]

Once the police have targets set for them to hit in terms of "cybercrime", then they will start taking it seriously. Until then, fat chance.

And when they DO get a target, expect overzealous pursuit of "soft" targets, rather than ones which might actually require some effort: witness, for example, their massive enthusiasm for prosecuting drivers with Due Care offences even for trivial accidents, because it hits targets, and it's far easier than solving a burglary or something.

Sorry, nearly forgot: you can't call them "accidents" anymore. You may have thought they were joking in Hot Fuzz when they say "They're collisions now. Accidents implies no one was to blame". They weren't.

Yes, IAALIRL.

Edit: right, rant out of the way. Sorry about that. But I do believe the above.

Anyway, I doubt the gov't gives a single, solitary sh*t about harrassment or what have you: their view is probably "for god's sake, man up!". The Daily mash, I feel, hit the nail on the head recently with this article:

LInky

Unfortunately, as can be seen when someone is imprisoned for crimes against a company/ the economy vs the sentences people get for rape or murder, the message is this: "Doesn't really matter what you do to a human, go for your life. But don't you DARE f**k with a company."

[Georgy291]

they seem to miss the point completely once again.

Dont bloody fight piracy, fight the cause off it

[Jennifer E-Victims]

Once the police have targets set for them to hit in terms of "cybercrime", then they will start taking it seriously. Until then, fat chance.

Hi guys I'm new to Hexus' community. I'm Jennifer - managing director of E-Victims.Org

Shooty has a point but before they can set targets the police have to first start recording e-crime. Currently, this isn't being done as there isn't a box to tick on their paperwork.

[Shooty*]

Blimey.

Welcome, Jennifer.

[nichomach]

Welcome to Hexus, Jennifer. Your point's well taken; they're not going to develop a clue as to what offences are being committed, against whom and by whom unless and until they start recording. That's possibly the most concrete and achievable starting point; when someone attempts to report an e-crime, be it ebay fraud or harassment or whatever, recording it as an offence should not be discretionary, it should be mandatory, with sanctions available for non-compliance. Then they might develop some more solid data on what offences are occurring and then have something on which to base an "e-crime strategy".

[Jennifer E-Victims]

when someone attempts to report an e-crime, be it ebay fraud or harassment or whatever, recording it as an offence should not be discretionary, it should be mandatory, with sanctions available for non-compliance.

Thanks for the welcome. Y'all seem like smart folks here (btw - I'm an Okie - Oklahoman)

Again I find myself agreeing completely with what you have said. Currently it is a bit of a police postcode lottery when it comes to reporting online incidents.

[Jay]

wow... its fantastic to see some one actually come here to chat directly to us! Makes me feel more confident about the strategy.

[latrosicarius]

"they can take the person to court themselves under Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and get a restraining order."

Sometimes you know the identity of the person harassing you. Many times you don't. Our organization was relentlessly DOS attacked by an individual who still remains anonymous.

(Denial Of Service -- where a person rents various servers from around the world, spams your organization's server or website, and fills up your bandwidth so nobody can access your site or services)

Neither the person's ISP (nor the companies from which he rents the servers from to attack us) will provide his identity due to customer confidentiality.

Good luck trying to sue someone like that. He cost us thousands, and we had to move our server to a more expensive hosting solution, which could mitigate his attacks. It also caused us nearly two months of down-time (on and off), which lost us customers. Indeed, we saw our website statistics decrease by half while we were being attacked. This harassment is real, and causes real damages, and there is no recourse. I am all for internet anonymity in most cases, but there should be some police organization that you can report this abuse to (and hopefully action will be taken instead of ignoring you).

[TheAnimus]

The problem is the way the police tackle crimes in the real world, leads us to have little confidence of cyber crime.

The last time i was involved in a project which became DoS'd it was actually easier for one of the members to track down the originator than it was to try and perswade the authorities a crime had been commited. Considering this involved gaining access to one of the bots (apparently it was a script kiddie using off the self software) wait in the IRC channel until the bostmaster signed on, then working from there.......... In other words a lot of effort.

Given the fact the last time I had to call 999 for the police (this sat as it happened) i've already had to complain as to how the issue was handled, and it was an incredibly simple one, i fear to think how the ambiguity of the net, combined with jurisdictional issues will fair.

No it won't, we will be lucky if all this task force is able to deal with is 16 year olds been rubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish on facebook.

[Brewster0101]

What punishments will be given to e-crime offenders???

Considering you can commit man slaughter now and only serve two years in prison ( I believe this was a sentence last year in Wales ), I wonder what you will get for online fraud or harassment.

Probably get more time..

I don't think anyone in this country or outside the UK takes the police force in this country seriously any more.

There was a report released the other day about the affects of single parents on their children. I believe the government were trying to blame single parents for the state of young crime. Report suggested otherwise.

I think the reason modern crime is soaring is because kids and people think 'why not, I can get away with it, even if caught'

So the bottom line is - why bother with this!, its just something for the police to do to earn a pay cheque, but nothing serious will come of it for 99% of innocent victims.

[Jennifer E-Victims]

Sometimes you know the identity of the person harassing you. Many times you don't.

This very true. You can get a court order to have the ISP reveal the perpetrators name. That works in the UK most other EU countries and the USA. However, if they are going via an anonymous proxy server in Russia or many other places then it is impossible to get the cooperation you need.

As a client said to me this week and it is so true "The trouble with all of this is simply potentially thousands of pounds in costs to put a stop to something that has cost the originator a few pounds to start".

The new PECU (police e-crime unit) investigates DOS attacks. You can ask that your case is referred to them.

[aidanjt]

And most of the serious e-crimes are launched from Russia/China/certain places in Africa, for which you'll get practically zero assistance from those governments or their legal systems.