BY JIM HUTCHISON
On the dark side of the information highway, scam artists await the unsuspecting
ANDREW ARKINSTALL, a 34-year-old father of three in Maxville, Ont., needed a laptop for his home-based business. Like millions of other Canadians, who spent $4.4 billion shopping on-line last year, he felt comfortable buying in the digital marketplace.
������ Surfing computers-for-sale listings on Yahoo! last April, he found exactly what he was looking for -- an IBM ThinkPad advertised at an irresistible price on the professional-looking web pages at Computer cheap.com. After confirming shipping details and the company's seven-day money-back guarantee via e-mail, he express-posted a $2,100 certified cheque, as requested, to the company's Vancouver address.
������ Three days later, after the cheque was cashed, Arkinstall e-mailed the company to ask why the computer hadn't arrived. The seller replied that a mix-up with the cheque at the bank had held things up and promised to throw in a DVD drive. When Arkinstall demanded a contact phone number, Computer Cheap's web site suddenly vanished and Arkinstall's e-mails went unanswered.
������ He called the Better Business Bureau of Mainland B.C. "Mr. Arkinstall wasn't the first person to call us about being swindled by this company," director Valerie MacLean says.
������ When he reported the fraud to Det. Vello Kleeband of the Vancouver Police Computer Investigative Support Unit, he discovered the seller was a juvenile scam artist under investigation for a string of on-line frauds, with victims as far away as California. Says Arkinstall, "I've learned the hard way that it's 'user beware' on the Internet." ������ Sgt. Bill Cowper of the Halifax Regional Police Technological Support Section says too many people are leaving themselves vulnerable to fraud when they log on to the Net. ������ Known as the city's Internet Cop, Cowper has trained 16 police investigators to combat proliferating computer crime. "Cyberfraud is growing as fast as the Internet," he says, but he estimates that less than ten percent of Internet crime is reported because embarrassed victims are reluctant to come forward. ������ With up to 80 percent of households expected to be on-line by 2005, experts like Cowper predict Internet fraud will only get worse. ������
Phillip McKee, assistant director for Internet Fraud Watch at the National Fraud Information Centre, in Washington, D.C., says, "People are being scammed on-line in record numbers." In 1996 Internet Fraud Watch reported 1,000 incidents of Internet fraud in the United States and Canada. Last year complaints soared to more than 10,000. "Complaints about on-line shopping have doubled in the last year," says McKee, "making cyberfraud involving goods for sale our number one complaint."
������ Const. Michael McCrory of the RCMP's Computer Crime Unit in Montreal says the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people anonymously, by setting up slick web sites or through mass e-mailing, makes the Internet a bonanza for criminals. "They don't have to pay for a stamp or even make a phone call to snare victims," he says. The lack of signatures and face-to-face transactions makes it easy for criminals to operate on-line.
������ Says Ontario Provincial Police Det.-Const. Gaston Laforge at PhoneBusters, an agency in North Bay, Ont., that collects information on telemarketing complaints nationwide, "If a single on-line scammer reaches several thousand people through 'spamming' (mass e-mailing) or phony web sites, and hooks just 100 people for $100 each, he rakes in $10,000, with his only costs his computer and Internet access."