Falando para as moscas...

The Internet Crime Complaint Centre, a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Centre, ranks Romania fifth in its table of internet crime. But most experts agree that much of the cash being made on auction fraud reported as originating in the U.S., Canada, Britain, Spain or Italy is actually being picked up in those countries by Romanian money mules. An eBay fraud ring busted last year in Chicago, for example, has been traced to Pitesti, Romania. eBay, which doesn't even operate a site in Romania, won't talk dollar figures but acknowledges that the country is the No. 1 source of 'professional fraud'.

On a November 2006 visit to the Romanian capital, Bucharest, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the vast majority of Internet fraud committed on 'one prominent U.S. online auction website is connected to Romania or Romanians.'

A classic Romanian scam is the 'second chance auction'. The mark: an eBay user who has narrowly lost an auction. The scammers can see that the user was prepared to spend, say, $145 on a particular item. They will then try to guess the user's e-mail address so that they can make contact off the eBay platform to offer a second chance to buy the item. Users commonly have the same e-mail address as their eBay user name, so the scammers may send out 50 e-mail messages using an eBay user name and the most common domain names such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

The Romanian scammers then cook up elaborate stories to persuade their victims to send money via unrecoverable methods such as Western Union - even instructing people not to tell Western Union the payment is for an eBay transaction, claiming Western Union will charge them an eBay surcharge of 10% (it doesn't), and instead to say they're sending money to their Romanian cousin.

'The fraudsters need to know we're coming after them,' said Rob Chesnut, Spasova's boss and a former federal prosecutor who set up eBay's Trust and Safety division.

To give the Romanian police a fighting chance, eBay has donated computers, digital cameras and Internet connections. Romania has taught eBay a lesson: the importance of 'addressing a problem region before we have a problem,' said Matt Henley, senior manager of eBay's Technical Investigations and Analysis Group, who has spent time with Spasova in Romania. Henley says eBay is now alert to threats from 'regions we weren't paying attention to' and, thanks to Romania, has a ready-to-deploy government-relations-in-a-box programme it can take anywhere in the world.

Source: Los Angeles Times