I was writing today about the movie Pirates of the Caribbeans, naming the post “Pirates at their Worst“. In the meanwhile I found this article on the APC Magazine’s web site, called Romania: a global hotspot for eBay fraud. It reported that the Australian office of eBay has organized a news conference to talk about the frauds commited by Romanians. According to a report from 2006 of the IC3.GOV Internet Crime Complaint Center, Romanian ring crime scammed eBay users for $5,000,000. Out of the sudden, pirats are no longer romantic heroes, looking for adventure, driven by honor and best rolemodels our kids can have.
Mat Henley, of the eBay global fraud investigation team said that:
We discovered that Romania had a huge technology gap between generations. It was enormous: 25-30 year old criminals were some of the brightest people we’ve dealt with, but when you mix in the prosecutors, law enforcement and magistrates, some of them had never been on a computer – period.
To tackle the perpetrators, eBay had to buy computers and digital cameras for the Romanian police and involve US agents working in Romania. The result were “hundreds” of arrests being made, though he refused to give any figures about the actual impact on the internet fraud.
Now, what I have to say about that: yes, Romanians were involved in many frauds, but I doubt that eBay bought computers for the Romanian Police and they made hundreds of arrests in Romania. The news conference was rather a way to make publicity for the company and calm down the unrest among Australian users about frauds on eBay. If you read the report I mentioned above, you’ll see that Romania takes only the 5th place, accounting for only 1.6% of fraud.
Top Ten Countries – Perpetrator
1. United States – 60.9%
2. United Kingdom – 15.9%
3. Nigeria – 5.9%
4. Canada – 5.6%
5. Romania – 1.6%
6. Italy – 1.2%
7. Netherlands – 1.2%
8. Russia– 1.1%
9. Germany – 0.7%
10. South Africa – 0.6%
Most of Romanians operated from countries such as US or UK. I don’t think they had to buy computers to the Police in these countries. So, without a real report from eBay or Romanian Police about the frauds made from Romania, I call the eBay announcements a scam.
And as an interesting thing, I read in the report that:
Pruette is a Romanian national and is currently being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He is believed to be part of a multi-state cell which sends funds to Romania and other countries to support terrorist efforts.
So, according to people that investigate internet crime, Romania might be a terorrist heaven. Let’s only hope that after the Middle East, they won’t focus on us to counter terrorism and bring democracy to the area.
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