No reward for cybercrime in Los Angeles 13-Septembre-2007

In Las Vegas, a man was sued by the Federal Court for electronic criminal activity, for faking the identity of a lawyer, specialist in intellectual property, and thereby threatened of prosecuting domain names owners.

Mr. Scali, 28 years old, created an email account under an alias and used it to send his victims messages in which he proclaimed he was a lawyer. He threatened to sue the owners of several domain names up to $100.000 for offense to the brand, unless they gave up the registration of their domain names within two days. In some of his emails, he also declared he was affiliated to a law firm of New-York. The accused pleaded guilty to the charges that were brought against him and he admitted that his goal was to acquire these domain names for his own financial profit.

In the next few weeks, he will be summoned for a reading of the impeachment act at the Federal Court of Los Angeles.

The maximal penalty enforced for an electronic criminal activity is twenty years in a federal jail. The agreement between the prosecutor and the respondent would lead to probation of six months in custody, but only the judge will take the last decision…

The cheat aimed at domain names close to Brands or common words, to make his victims afraid of being confused or recognized as cyber squatters by the justice. Faced to his threat and the $100 000$ possible lawsuit, they gave in the so-called lawyer who was pressuring them.

EBy recovering these domain names, the cyber criminal could assure himself an income on several ways, more or less illegal : sponsored links, advertising paid by the “pay by click”, phishing… The domain name field offers many possibilities to produce money, and the limits of legality in this subject are not always well determined by the laws of all the different countries. There still are fuzzy parts in the legislation, as we mentioned in our article called "the bailiff report".

Many spammers use the name of famous companies, like for example e-Bay or PayPal as the sender’s heading in order to mislead their target… An informed user will be able to find what address the email is really generated from and expose a fraud attempt but unfortunately, all Internet users are not able to elude all the traps of the Internet. Should you find yourself in uncertain situations, do not hesitate to contact our newsroom.

Hélène de Brettes Pour Domainews.fr / Domaine.info