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Making life easy for Net-crooks

Everyone (especially governments and enforcement agencies) are telling us that instances of fraud and crime involving the internet are on the rise.

Whether it's music/movie piracy, child porn or the outright theft of money, criminals have twigged that the Net is a great place to do their business.

Now, with this in mind, you'd think that police all over the world would be switched on and just waiting to jump on any cybercrooks or instances of cybercrime -- especially when solving that crime and catching the villain might be as simple as parking outside a Western Union Office and waiting for the offender to turn up.

Unfortunately, based on my experience the other day, that seems not always to be the case.

On Wednesday night, I received an email from David Thomas.

Who is David Thomas?

I have no bleeding idea -- but it seems that David had my email address in his address book when someone got access to his email and decided to perpetrate one of the most common scams on the Net.

The first point of contact was this email to me (and other undisclosed recipients):

"I am in Madrid Spain at the moment, I am here for a conference and I just had my bag stolen from me with my passport and personal effects. I have been trying to sort things out with the necessary authorities, I need some assistance from you.

Let me know if you can be of any help."

Immediately I smelt a rat -- recognising this as the common scam that it is -- so I replied back to him in the tone of a close friend and asked if he needed some cash to tide him over until things were sorted.

Here's his reply:

Gotcha!

I figured it would now be a very simple job to contact Spanish Police in Madrid and set up a sting. I'd send my very good friend David a fake Western Union MTN (money transfer number) and the cops could ask the WU office at that address to call them when the guy turned up to claim it.

So I went to the Spanish Police website and, with the aid of Google Translate, found that the only way to report a crime is by phone or in person -- no email!

Further searching around the site came up with a contact form -- but in order for it to be accepted I had to enter a valid phone number and zip-code. Nothing I entered into these forms would encourage the system to accept my tip-off.

In the end I simply gave up.

However, to make absolutely sure this was a scam, I emailed "David" back and told him that I had good friends who lived near Madrid and that they could drop off a big stack of euros at the hotel or conference venue he was using.

Needless to say -- the conversation went cold at that point -- he has not replied.

Sorry, but if the world's enforcement authorities really want to catch these crooks they're going to have to realise that most of the offending involves events occurring beyond their own borders and that tip-offs could come from anywhere in the world.

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