fraud

In a criminal prosecution brought by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, ASIC, the financial regulator, two out of five criminal charges brought against an alleged fraudster were dropped because the witnesses in those cases became "unavailable." The charges related to conducting an unauthorised financial services business and to soliciting moneys which were used improperly.

Nevertheless, the accused has pleaded guilty to the remaining three charges at the door of the court before his trial commenced yesterday.

It's a long and convoluted story across years and jurisdictions as well as various enforcement agencies.

I am so blessed. This chap has purloined money from a cryptocurrency account and wants to send it to me. So he chose an address at antimoneylaundering.net.

If you were to receive mail from a government URL, you'd give it the time of day. Everyone would.

But this fake investment scam uses an address owned by the government of Paraguay as its spoofed "from" address. And, of course, it uses a free any anonymous e-mail address to collect responses from its victims.

And behind the spam-scam is a far more sophisticated scheme. We scrape away the stinky stuff and lay bare the fraudulent scheme.

How often do you read something and find out that it's not what you thought it was when you started?

For all those that leapt on "Melbourne" - it's almost certainly not the one you were thinking of.

Melbourne, Florida is where this story is developing.

If you want to be ripped off, e-mail the following:

*NAME: MR MARTIN COOK
EMAIL: **martincoookuk@gmail.com*
or martincoookuk@sim.it

There's an actor called Zachary Joseph Horwitz. He's also known as Zach Avery. He lives in a place called Berverlywood. Honestly. It's not Beverly (sic) Hills and it's not Hollywood. Actors, at least the good ones, are skilled at creating an illusion. What you see is not supposed to be real.

So what happens when an actor takes those skills away from the stage? The answer is... he gets arrested for fraud. And then the Federal Bureau of Investigation gets excited and issues a media release worthy of a hyperbolic - and grammatically dubious - studio. But under that, there's actually a good story.

In 2015, I wrote "Cleaning up the 'Net." It was an action plan to reduce incidence of financial and other crime committed over the internet. One of the main principles of the book is that those that provide services to internet users - including domain name registrars and others - were enabling and profiting from crime.

Is 2021 the year when someone listens and starts to take seriously the ease with which criminals can, for example, register domain names that even the most basic know-your-customer would establish is more likely than not to be used for some improper purpose?

On the weekend when, at last, the USA gets laws to require at least some degree of declaration of the ownership of companies, is there an appetite to tackle this even bigger problem?

Hint: it's not...