Events | 2010.02.14
World Cup fraudsters to be targeted by new cyber-enforcement team
Online ticket sales to South African tournament will be policed in crackdown on internet scams
Websites selling fake tickets for this summer\'s World Cup finals in South Africa are to become part of the focus of a new cyber-enforcement team set up by the government to crack down on internet and email scams.
Similar scams, including those online, currently cost three million UK consumers £3.5bn a year, according to the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and email is now the most common scam approach. An estimated 73% of adults have received a scam email in the past year.
The new cyber-enforcement team is being given £4.3m over three years to focus on these fraudulent emails, as well as on websites such as those that run scams where tickets sold for concerts, festivals, football matches and other events are either counterfeit or non-existent. It will also look at websites that dupe customers into making what appear to be bargain purchases, but where the consumer receives either nothing at all or counterfeit products, and will crack down on traders who try to hide their identities in order to avoid giving consumers redress.
"As they [the fraudsters] get more sophisticated, we need to stay one step ahead," said the consumer minister, Kevin Brennan. "Football fans will spend good money travelling to South Africa to support England in this year\'s World Cup. I don\'t want fraudsters ruining fans\' chances of enjoying this huge sporting event. Our enforcers will crack down on fake websites and stop people being ripped off by these criminals."
The team, which will be made up of trading standards enforcers in every region of England, Scotland and Wales, will use "sophisticated technology to gather evidence to a criminal standard" and will make test purchases from websites that it suspects of acting unlawfully.
"We will trace the operators of websites and either take action or pass details to our international enforcement partners," said a spokesman for the OFT. "In certain circumstances, we will get websites taken down."
Last year, a number of websites claiming to sell tickets for the Reading, Leeds and V festivals – as well as the Beijing Olympics the previous year – shut down, leaving thousands of fans without tickets and significantly out of pocket.
Then in August, in the first Metropolitan Police operation of its kind, detectives from the Police Central e-crime Unit successfully took action against more than 100 websites selling football tickets illegally. It followed this up in December by shutting down more than 1,200 websites claiming to sell cut-price designer goods such as Ugg boots and Tiffany jewellery.
The latest scam alert from the OFT comes just in time for Valentine\'s Day. It is warning people to be on their guard against "romance fraudsters" who target singles columns and dating websites to search for victims. These fraudsters create fictitious online profiles and send out unsolicited emails or letters, said the OFT, often with fake photographs, using the trust they build up to persuade their victims to part with large sums of money in frauds that can go on for years.
The government is setting up a complaints register where people can notify others of online scams. This is expected to be in place by the end of the year.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/feb[...]-internet-fraudsters-crackdown
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