Part 4: Dot-Con – Online fraud from the victim’s perspective

In previous posts I described Paul and Scott, two innocent people on different continents who were both victimized by online (and somewhat offline) scams. As a reminder, Paul fell for an inheritance advance-fee scam and Scott was victimized as an eBay power seller by a drop-ship scam.

Once they realized something was wrong, here’s what they did to try to rectify the situation.

Since Paul was in a different country from where the scam was purported to have taken place, he was at a loss as to how to proceed. He figured his local law enforcement wouldn’t be interested in a case that was for a fairly small amount and was outside of their jurisdiction. He wanted to contact the police in London, but was not sure how to do that. So, he saw my email address in association with electronic crime and reached out to me for help. After I spoke to him he did go to his local law enforcement office. They said they’d get back to him.

When I heard about Paul’s case, I contacted some of my friends. One explained that law enforcement in England has to prioritize their cases and anything below $100k in loss doesn’t make the cut. Another gave me the email address of some law enforcement people in Paul’s country. Paul emailed them and never heard back. Someone suggested he report the fraud to www.ic3.gov where it could get aggregated with other scams. He did that. I also asked a friend at the FTC to send something to the analogous organization in Paul’s country. He did, but we didn’t hear back. Finally, we went to the local police. They say they are working on it, but the case doesn’t seem promising.

By the time I talked to Scott he had contacted “every law enforcement agency he could think of”. He had talked to his local law enforcement, the FBI, and the Canadian authorities (since the money was picked up in Canada). He told me he had walked through his story numerous times with each of them. He had saved all of the documentation and was able to show it to them to help them track down the criminals.

In addition, Scott had done some sleuthing of his own. He had called Western Union to find out whether the money had been picked up and, if it had, where. They told him it had been picked up in Canada. He had called the newspaper to see if they knew any more about the advertiser only to be told that the newspaper realized it was a fraudulent ad and that they weren’t going to get paid.