Internet crime is crime committed on the Internet, using the Internet and by means of the Internet.

Computer crime is a general term that embraces such crimes as phishing, credit card frauds, bank robbery, illegal downloading, industrial espionage, child pornography, kidnapping children via chat rooms, harassment, scams, cyberterrorism, creation and/or distribution of viruses, spam and so on. All such crimes are computer related and facilitated crimes. Computer crime, cybercrime, e-crime, hi-tech crime or electronic crime generally refers to criminal activity where a computer or network is the source, tool, target, or place of a crime. ... An example of a phishing email, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank. ... Credit card fraud is a wide-ranging term for theft and fraud committed using a credit card or any similar payment mechanism as a fraudulent source of funds in a transaction. ... It has been suggested that Safecatch be merged into this article or section. ... The copyright infringement of software is often called software piracy by those seeking to reduce its incidence. ... Spy and Secret agent redirect here. ... Child pornography refers to pornographic material depicting children. ... A chat room is an online forum where people can chat online (talk by broadcasting messages to people on the same forum in real time). ... Harassment refers to a wide spectrum of offensive behavior. ... A confidence trick, confidence game, or con for short, (also known as a scam) is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. ... Cyber-terrorism is terrorism that uses cracking over computer networks and Internet-based attacks in the service of terrorism. ... Stop editing pages god ... This article is about electronic spam. ...

With the evolution of the Internet, along came another revolution of crime where the perpetrators commit acts of crime and wrongdoing on the World Wide Web. Internet crime takes many faces and is committed in diverse fashions. The number of users and their diversity in their makeup has exposed the Internet to everyone. Some criminals in the Internet have grown up understanding this superhighway of information, unlike the older generation of users. This is why Internet crime has now become a growing problem in the United States. Some crimes committed on the Internet have been exposed to the world and some remain a mystery up until they are perpetrated against someone or some company.

The different types of Internet crime vary in their design and how easily they are able to be committed. Internet crimes can be separated into two different categories. There are crimes that are only committed while being on the Internet and are created exclusively because of the World Wide Web. The typical crimes in criminal history are now being brought to a whole different level of innovation and ingenuity. Such new crimes devoted to the Internet are email “phishing”, hijacking domain names, virii propagation, and cyber vandalism. A couple of these crimes are activities that have been exposed and introduced into the world. People have been trying to solve virus problems by installing virus protection software and other software that can protect their computers. Other crimes such as email “phishing” are not as known to the public until an individual receives one of these fraudulent emails. These emails are cover faced by the illusion that the email is from your bank or another bank. When a person reads the email he/she is informed of a problem with he/she personal account or another individual wants to send the person some of their money and deposit it directly into their account. The email asks for your personal account information and when a person gives this information away, they are financing the work of a criminal.

According to security firm Symantec, Internet criminal activities have become a serious commercial activity with selling email addresses, details of bank accounts and credit cards through underworld auction sites is on the rise. Some even use trusted websites such as MySpace and Facebook to do this.^[1] Symantec Corporation NASDAQ: SYMC, founded in 1982, is an international corporation which sells computer software, particularly in the realms of security and information management. ... An e-mail address identifies a location to which e-mail can be delivered. ... A bank account is a monetary account with a banking institution recording the balance of money for a customer. ... Look up credit card in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article needs additional references or sources for verification. ... MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. ... Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA Facebook is a social networking website, that was launched on February 4, 2004. ...

Statistics

The statistics that have been obtained and reported about demonstrate the seriousness Internet crimes in the world. Just the "phishing" emails mentioned in a previous paragraph produce one billion dollars for their perpetrators (Dalton 1). In a FBI survey in early 2004, 90 percent of the 500 companies surveyed reported a security breach and 80 percent of those suffered a financial loss (Fisher 22). A national statistic in 2003 stated that four billion dollars in credit card fraud are lost each year. Only two percent of credit card transactions take place over the Internet but fifty percent of the four billion, mentioned before, are from the transaction online (Burden and Palmer 5). All these finding are just an illustration of the misuse of the Internet and a reason why Internet crime has to be slowed down.

Stopping the problem

The question about how to police these crimes has already been constructed, but this task is turning out to be an uphill battle. Since the first computer crime law, the Counterfeit Access Device and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, the government has been trying to track down and stop online criminals. The FBI has tried many programs and investigations in order to deter Internet crime, like creating an online crime registry for employers (Metchik 29). The reality is that Internet criminals are rarely caught. One reason is that hackers will use one computer in one country to hack another computer in another country. Another eluding technique used is the changing of the emails, which are involved in virus attacks and “phishing” emails so that a pattern cannot be recognized. An individual can do their best to protect themselves simply by being cautious and careful. Internet users need to watch suspicious emails, use unique passwords, and run anti-virus and anti-spyware software. Do not open any email or run programs from unknown sources. A large number of toolbars, some added by spyware, overwhelm an Internet Explorer session. ...

See also

• Internet fraud

This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

References

• Kit Burden and Creole Palmer. (2003). Internet Crime: Cyber Crime-A New Breed of Criminal? Computer Law and Security Report. 19 (3): 222-227.
• Richard J. Dalton. (2005). Newsday.
• Dennis Fisher. (2004). EWeek 21.
• Eric Metchik. (1997). A Typology of Crime on the Internet. Security Journal 9 (1-3): 27-31.

Picture: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,122242,00.asp

External links

• Fraud in the Internet article by Computer Crime Research Center
• Groups to stop illegal images on the net:
• Cyber Law Discussion Forums
• Tips about online money