Move to a better address - Today freemail . The Net starts here. The Internet has created a whole new environment for fraud and deception, giving regulators new problems in tracking down offenders and enforcing the law, speakers told a Law Institute of Victoria seminar last week. David Perry, the team leader and lawyer for ASIC's new electronic enforcement unit, said the workload was already so high the team had to be selective about what it investigated. The carefully constructed site used common scamster's tricks, like pictures of the directors and lists showing that more expensive parts of the investment were oversubscribed.
People throw money at lots of things.
Online trading was a large area of concern, he said. There are now 13 registered Internet brokers, with half a million users - an increase of 900 per cent since last June. Perry said some of the silver surfer category appeared to be vulnerable to attractive sites which seemed to have a lot of money behind them. Both the ACCC and ASIC rely on agreements with both overseas enforcement bodies and local Internet service providers to help them gather evidence, which may include ISP's proxy logs or copies of offender's hard drives. Although automatic trawling of sites was being investigated, ASIC was still trying to find ways to deal with the borderless, anonymous and easily accessible nature of cyberspace, he said.