The latest apparent cyberporn mousetrap victims: a number of Baltimore-area residents, who have been getting nasty little surprises on their telephone bills - charges between $50 and $200 a pop for computer connections to porn sites they weren't even aware they were visiting, says a Baltimore Sun columnist.
"None had ever told their computers to dial the numbers, although they remembered occasions when porn sites appeared unbidden in their Web browser," wrote Mike Himowitz. "Unfortunately, these folks have a serious problem on their hands. They or their kids have inadvertently downloaded a program that disconnects them from their dialup Internet service provider and silently dials a porn site, either through a 900 number or by an international toll call to Chad, Vanuatu, Moldova, Madagascar or some other country with outrageous connect charges."
Sound familiar? It should. It's a problem that has bedeviled cyberporn almost since its creation. One of the highest-profile such cases involved the owner-operators of Kara's Adult Playground and other popular adult sites. As AVN.com reported in early 2001, RJB Telcom was compelled to settle with the Federal Trade Commission two years ago over charges that RJB had billed credit and debit card customers for site access and international telephone line access the customers never even sought.
The practice is known as mousetrapping, and usually involves a Web surfer who doesn't want to truck with the cyberporn getting routed to an international server or telephone connection - and disconnected from his actual computer line hookup - when he tries to leave an adult site with which he doesn't want to bother. And such customers normally don't know they even had such international access until they learn the hard way, on their telephone or credit card bills.
The FTC found no evidence that RJB or its principals, Richard and Robert Botto, had defrauded anyone, the Bottos claiming from the outset that they and their company were themselves the victims of Webmaster fraud.
"Sometimes the victims have trouble figuring out just who charged them - the only listing is a third-party billing company that doesn't want to hear complaints, or a long distance carrier whose customer service department says, 'Tough luck, you made the call'," Himowitz writes.
And the mousetrappers are nothing if not clever about their dubious ware: If they've slipped a porn-directed dialer onto your personal computer, Himowitz continues, you'll have just as tough a time getting rid of that as getting rid of the phone bill charges you didn't ask to have. "Clicking on the program's Uninstall icon will only trigger a program that reinstalls it," he writes. "Even erasing the program files won't work - they'll show up the next time you start up your computer."
He says of such unwitting computer victims that they're the "losers in an ongoing war" between cybersurfers and those who want to plant programs into their computers, "either to spy on them or rip them off outright."
That ongoing war was something the FTC recognized in early 2001, as the RJB case was being settled. "[We face] a host of novel challenges in its efforts to combat fraud and deception online," said FTC planning and information associate Hugh Stevenson to the Senate Finance Committee that April. "Because it is both global in its reach and instantaneous, the Internet lends itself well not only to adaptations of traditional scams - such as pyramid schemes and false product claims - but also to new high-tech scams that were not possible before development of the Internet. In addition, the Internet enables con artists to cloak themselves in anonymity, which makes it necessary for law enforcement authorities to act much more quickly to stop newly-emerging deceptive schemes before the perpetrators disappear."
