US Prosecutor Urges Crack Down on 'the Scourge of Online Scams'

Last month America's Federal Bureau of Investigation released its annual report on internet crime, which a former federal prosecutor bemoans as "another record year." The bureau received 791,790 complaints of "internet-enabled crime" in 2020 (a 69 percent increase over the prior year), representing over $4.1 billion in reported losses (a 20 percent increase). These complaints included a wide array of crimes, such as phishing, spoofing, extortion, data breaches, and identity theft. Collectively, they represent further evidence of the Justice Department's long-running failure to effectively pursue internet fraud. Since the start of the pandemic, the scope and frequency of this criminal activity has become noticeably worse. Online fraudsters have stolen government relief checks, sold fake test kits and vaccines, and exploited the altruistic impulses of the American public through fake charities. But the broader failure has wreaked incalculable harm on the American public for years, including those in our most vulnerable and less tech-savvy populations, like senior citizens. The FBI's most recent report makes it clear that the government needs to dramatically step up and rethink its approach to combating internet-based fraud — including how it tracks this problem, as well as how it can punish and deter these crimes more effectively going forward... One major reason that internet fraud remains such a persistent and vexing problem is that the Justice Department has never made it a real priority — in part because these kinds of cases are not particularly attractive to prosecutors. Victim losses on an individual basis tend to be relatively small and widely dispersed. A substantial amount of this crime also originates abroad, and it can be hard and bureaucratically cumbersome to obtain evidence from foreign governments — particularly from countries where these scams comprise a large, de facto industry that employs many people. It is also far more challenging to find and secure cooperating insider witnesses when the perpetrators are beyond our borders. And even under the best of circumstances, the large body of documentary evidence that fraud cases involve can be exceedingly difficult to gather and review. If you manage to overcome all of those obstacles, you may still end up having to deal with years of extradition-related litigation before anyone ever sees the inside of a courtroom. Making matters worse, much of the press does not treat these cases as particularly newsworthy — itself a symptom of how routine internet fraud has become — and prosecutors like being in the press... [T]ime is not on our side. This is a problem that will continue to metastasize — including in new and unpredictable ways — unless and until the federal government dramatically steps up its enforcement efforts.

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