Spam and Internet fraud -- the twin plagues of the information age -- are getting stepped-up attention from federal and state agencies that say more joint effort from law enforcement groups is needed to curb the scourge that is online swindling.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it has joined forces with eight state law enforcement agencies and four Canadian consumer protection groups to crack down on cyber scam artists ranging from purveyors of phony cancer treatments to senders of chain e-mail solicitations.
According to the FTC, the two-year effort named "International Netforce" has resulted in 63 mostly civil cases against alleged fraudsters over the last six months, many of which were first announced Tuesday. The agencies have also launched a joint anti-spam effort, sending warning letters to more than 500 people believed to have sent deceptive e-mail mass mailings.
"We will not allow the Internet to be a vehicle for promoting one of the oldest scams in the book," said Christine Gregoire, attorney general of Washington, one of the eight Northwestern states participating in the FTC-led effort. The FTC said it hopes to expand such joint efforts to encompass more states and foreign agencies in the near future.
Law enforcement agencies said they placed particular emphasis on cracking down on con artists who tried to take advantage of panic arising from Sept. 11 and the anthrax scare. Companies that hawked the anthrax treatment Cipro online for those without prescriptions, or offered ineffective anthrax test kits, were high on the list of targets, Gregoire said.
The FTC also levied serious charges in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Seattle against David L. Walker, whom they accuse of using an Internet site to market products he claims cure cancer.
The FTC said Walker charged customers up to $5,200 for a program he claimed would make surgery, chemotherapy and other conventional cancer treatments unnecessary. The agency said it pursued civil rather than criminal charges because it believed these would be easier to substantiate in court.
In another case, brought against a music website called Sound City 2000, the FTC said it has reached a settlement on charges that the owners took money from customers for CDs, but either didn't complete orders, made deliveries late or failed to provide timely refunds.
Other cases involved illegal chain letter schemes, online auction fraud and a company that promised members money to view online ads, but didn't pay them.
Agencies also focused on the not-exactly-illegal but nevertheless irritating aspects of online spam.
One experiment attempted to test the validity of the commonly held belief that responding to "remove me" or "unsubscribe" options included in bulk e-mail messages results in more spam.
In a first batch of tests, Charles Harwood, the FTC's Northwest Region director, said the results indicated that "unsubscribe" links, rather than constituting a clever ruse for obtaining valid e-mail addresses, are often simply dead addresses that go nowhere.
Harwood also noted that early efforts to crack down on spam have so far not curtailed the flood of junk e-mail. If anything, it's on the rise.
Since the beginning of 1998, the FTC said people have forwarded 10 million spam messages to uce@ftc.gov, the address for the agency's junk e-mail database.
But the all-time biggest month, Harwood said, was March. Following a publicity campaign to draw attention to the junk e-mail problem, the agency received 1 million forwarded spams in that month alone.
