Newsgroup: it.comp.www
Titolo: ATTENZIONE, frode telematica

Non so se sia questo il posto giusto per questo avviso, comunque
meglio qui che da nessun'altra parte.
	   INTERNET-PORN
	   FTC CRACKS INTERNET SCHEME INVOLVING PORNO AND MOLDOVA
	   Washington, Feb 19 Bloomberg - Federal authorities busted
up a
complex internet scheme - involving pornography, Windows 95 and the
country of Moldova - saying consumers were defrauded out of
thousands of dollars.
	   Tipped off by AT&T Corp, the Federal Trade Commission moved
quickly to shut down the two New York companies running the scam.
The agency conducted an expedited 30-day probe, which ended with
suits being filed against both companies and the three people
running them. Federal authorities said the scheme probably began in
mid-December.
	   ``This was one of the most insidious scams the FTC has ever
seen,'' said Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of
Consumer Protection, at a press conference in Washington.
	   Internet surfers unwittingly set off the elaborate
deception by
clicking on one of the adult-entertainment web sites run by these
companies. Consumers were told to download a special ``viewer''
program, which could only run on Microsoft Corp's Windows 95
operating system.
	   The web sites, whose addresses included 
www.sexygirls.com
and
www.1adult.com
, offered consumers ``more sex for free'' and ``all
nude all free pictures.'' Another Internet address, seeking to cash
in on teenagers affinity for MTV Network's Beavis and Butthead show,
used the address 
www.beavisbutthead.com
 but also provided adult
entertainment.
	   Downloading the software, though, disconnected computer
users
from their internet provider such as America Online or CompuServe
and reconnected the computers to a phone number in Moldova, an
Eastern European country that borders on Romania, federal
authorities said. The software included a mute function that would
prevent users from hearing their computers redialing a new number.
	   Because calls to this country cost about $US2.00 a minute,
some
consumers ended up with as much as $US3000 ($NZ4393) in
international long-distance on their monthly phone bills, said
Richard Petrillo, who is corporate security manager at AT&T. The
world's largest phone company caught the scheme through its consumer
watch bureau, which monitors clients phone bills for irregular
activity.
	   Consumers kept getting billed the Moldovan rates for as
long as
their computers were on, not just the time spent visiting the
adult-entertainment sites, the FTC said.
	   ``These bills were often the very first notice consumers
got that
they'd been massively scammed,'' Bernstein said.
	   The deception didn't end there, though. The calls, the FTC
said,
never even went to Moldova. North American calls to Moldova go to a
central calling centre in Canada before being routed to the Eastern
European country. But these calls, while showing up on phone bills
as having been sent, were diverted to a computer server somewhere
else in Canada, the FTC alleged.
	   Federal authorities allege that those running the scams
made a
profit by getting a portion of the consumer's payment that would be
forwarded to the foreign telephone company.
	   A federal judge in New York issued a temporary restraining
order
to halt the scams and froze the assets of those allegedly involved
until a trial is conducted. Consumers may be able to get refunds out
of the frozen assets, though AT&T's Petrillo said they still have to
pay their inflated phone bills.
	   The five-member commission voted 4-1 in favour of the
filing the
charges. Commissioner Christine Varney dissented, saying ``this
action is not the best use of the FTC's limited resources.''
Questi indirizzi possono tornare utili per il reperimento di notizie
come queste
http://www.fraud.org
http://news.com/

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