The U.S. Senate is looking to bite the phish: a bill to slap phishers in jail up to five years and pay $250,000 in fines has been introduced in the upper chamber of Capitol Hill.
“If you can’t trust where you are on the Web,” the bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), said in a formal statement announcing the bill July 9, “you are less likely to use it for commerce and communications.”
Phishing schemes customarily involve e-mail messages made to resemble official correspondence from financial institutions and other online commerce companies, usually telling recipients their account information lapsed or is about to lapse and re-entering it will prevent complete closure of their accounts. Those who fall for the e-mails learn the hard way that they were linked to fraudulent Websites where thieves were getting their sensitive personal information.
The scams are believed to have cost victims $1.2 billion in identity theft fraud in the year ending in April.
The Leahy bill emerged as phishing and other kinds of online fraud have come under increasing target from law enforcement and the federal government, with the Federal Trade Commission having filed several cases of fraud against suspected phishers. Gartner Research, the Connecticut-based Internet analysis firm, said phishing victims were three times as likely to have their identities stolen, based on a survey of 5,000 people the company performed in May.
The FTC has not yet announced any position on the Leahy bill, but they haven’t exactly been lacking for Internet-related fraud cases in their own right. A complaint the FTC brought against a scam said to sell phony multi-purpose public access Internet terminal business ventures since August 2001 has now resulted in a federal court restraining order freezing the defendants’ assets and appointing a temporary receiver.
The Internet Marketing Group in Lebanon, Tennessee, two Florida companies, companies in Louisiana, Arizona, and Nevada, were accused of acting in unison to sell the Internet terminal business ventures, telephone calling cards, and other goods and service businesses at prices between $12,994 and $249,950 through weekend sales seminars around the U.S. but misrepresenting what distributors could earn through basic sales and even resales.
The defendants were also accused of misrepresenting consumers’ rights to cancel purchase agreements and receive refunds, and of violating federal law by making “many calls to private residential telephone numbers” that were listed on the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry before August 31, 2003 as well as violating several state no-call laws.
