AOL goes phishing for identity theft crooks
…But will they catch anything - at all?
AOL has announced today that they have filed suit against 3 different identity theft rings, pursuing damages totaling over 18 Million dollars against the notorious “phishers”.
The suits were filed in Virginia under a new “Anti-Phishing” law implemented last July. Apparently, the lawsuits also have reference to federal law pertaining to trademark and antispam rules.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group has claimed to have found more than 50,000 phishing sites in 2005, which is being used by AOL to re-enforce the need to bring down phishers before the problem gets any worse.
Filing suit against these groups and tracking them down us quite different. It’s not known where exactly all of these groups reside; it has been suggested that they may consists of members in the US and reaching as far as Germany and Romania.
Is this attempt to “catch” these phishers just a waste of time? In many security experts, the answer differs. Some believe that while the perpetrators may not be captured, the act of filing such a high profile suit may make individuals partaking in phishing scams think twice. On the other hand, it could drive the industry further underground, forcing criminals to devise much more complex and devious methods of stealing personal information.
For more information on what phishing is, please read this post about Phishing and how to avoid it.
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