Cyberporn and credit card fraud
Operation Ore flawed by fraud - Guardian Unlimited Technology
This tells the story of a witch-hunt against supposed downloaders of child porn who were jailed for the offence in the UK on the basis that their credit cards were used to buy the material (or at least to join the sites concerned), and how it turns out that their credit cards were actually used by people other than them, i.e. fraudsters. How could the police not consider this, given that online credit card fraud was known of well before Operation Ore started? Given that it's been known for years that Windows-running PCs were open to penetration from botnets and other forms of piracy, how could they assume that a evidence of credit card use, or even of web browser access (because programs can identify falsely as other programs, which is often how Firefox users are able to access "IE-only" sites), to be evidence on its own?
Comments
I think that alot of the people involved have evidence on their pc's also and then confess.
Posted by: jamal | April 20, 2007 1:02 AM
I think the Guardian article was very misleading, which isn't that surprising given that the author is an 'expert' witness for people defending themselves against child porn charges. He gives the impression that police prosecute simply on the strength of credit card records. The credit card records simply provide the police leads. The author also wrongly claims that the Who guitarist Pete Townsend was wrongly accused. He admitted to downloading child porn, but argued it was for research. He was convicted and put on the sex offenders register.
Posted by: Zubair | April 22, 2007 6:22 AM
Zubair, to call the article "misleading" is a neat way of having to deal with the arguments it makes. And the fact is you're wrong. The police have carried out prosecutions based only on credit card details. Townshend was wrongly accused. He had no child pornography on his computer, and a lot of the detail (including what's he written on his own site) suggests he was confused at what he was being accused of.
He was put on the SOR - you're right - but you ought to look at all the facts of what happened.
And the fact that someone is a defence expert witness does not of itself make them wrong. The reality is told by the logs from the Landslide.com system. They show that loads of peoples' credit cards were used to sign up for sites - yet the sites were never visited by that login. Which is more likely - that the registrations were fake, or that the people paid the money but then found they had better stuff to do even after entering the credit card number, expiry date, number on the back, home address, email etc?
And which is more likely - that the police have found a huge underworld of child porn fanatics prepared to give out their credit card details at a time when most of the UK was on dialup and online buying was a bit unusual (1999), or that some porn webmasters found a way to generate revenue for themselves by creating fake registrations on the site handling credit cards for them?
Occam's Razor is sharp. Mind your fingers there.
Posted by: Charles | April 23, 2007 4:20 PM