Guest Commentary
Last week my wife and I both received scam attempts. The scammers didn’t get any money from us, but they did cause some inconvenience.
In some way that I don’t pretend to understand, they hacked into my wife’s computer, locked it up and demanded that she pay a ransom to have it released. She took it to our local computer store who got rid of the scammers in less than a minute.
Mine was a phone call from a sexy voiced computer telling me that I had problems with my credit card, and I needed to call them to have the problem resolved. One of our neighbors called and had her identity stolen, so I knew enough to hang up.
Both scammers left phone numbers, so it would seem to be very easy for cyber-crime fighters to apprehend them. Things aren’t always as easy as they seem.
I have a friend who runs a high-tech business in King County. A couple years ago, his company received an order for over $40,000 worth of computer memory chips to be shipped to an address in Texas. They had filled the order when one of his employees felt something was wrong and called the customer to discover that the order had been placed by a scammer.
My friend tried unsuccessfully to cancel the order. He then called the police in King County to be informed that no crime had been committed in their jurisdiction. He got the same result when he called law enforcement in Texas. At that point, he had a business to run, so he called me for help.
I reconstructed the email paperwork and found that the supplier had been tardy in acting on the cancellation order which got my friend partially off the hook, but I wanted to catch the thief, so I tried to determine to whom to report the crime.
I called our state Attorney General’s office where the answering machine told me, “Para Inglese marke uno.” So I marke-ed uno and was turned over to a friendly receptionist who declined jurisdiction and suggested I call the Seattle office of the FBI. She even gave me the number.
The FBI phone was answered by a female who listened to my long story and told me that I had to submit a written report. I asked if I would be wasting my time and she said “she was not at liberty to say.” I asked if I had contacted the correct office and, “she was not at liberty to say.” I asked what she was at liberty to say and she said, “she was not at liberty to say.”
I hung up fuming at the “helpfulness” of those who protect us from evil when my wife, who is a lot smarter than I am, suggested I call the Spokane FBI office. To my surprise and great pleasure, a nice young man listened to my story and told me the shipping address was an auto salvage lot outside of Dallas. I asked how he knew that and he said, “Google Earth.” So much for my investigative powers.
He then asked for the routing numbers of the original scammers email. He called back within 10 minutes and told me that the origin of the scam was in Eastern Europe. These scam rings hire low-lifes who pick up the packages and hand them over for distribution within the network.
With enough information, it is possible to catch the locals but the crooks who control the organization just hire new locals who make more money picking up packages then they do breaking car windows. I asked this nice young man if it was impossible to bust these organizations or just not worth it. He admitted it was some of both.
When I am the victim of cyber crime, I would like to see someone held responsible. I wonder how many Americans were scammed in the last year? How much money was lost to crooks with computers?
If it is a matter of law enforcement priority, I suggest they change their priority. I believe our country would be better off if the FBI went after these guys and quit playing politics with special prosecutors.
Frank Watson is a retired Air Force Colonel and long-time resident of Eastern Washington. He has been a freelance columnist for over 19 years.
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