One of the worst things about being a victim of cybercrime is that sinking feeling that you can’t do anything about it. Because of the immense freedom and anonymity on the Internet, people feel they can do pretty much anything and get away with it. My friend A had the unfortunate experience of having her contact details displayed on mail-order bride and pornographic websites. She didn’t understand why all of a sudden she was getting a lot of lewd phonecalls. To her horror, one of the men explained to her that they were simply responding to her rather provocative personal ads on the Net. Luckily we had an I.T. genius of a friend who figured everything out. He removed the ads and even traced them back to the culprit. The mastermind turned out to be B, the wife of A’s ex-boyfriend. As a back story, this girl, B, was actually the 3rd party who caused my friend, A, to break up with her cheating boyfriend. B got pregnant and so the guy married her. Apparently, B did this to get back at A because the guy confessed to her that he never really got over my friend (like it was A’s fault?!). Our I.T.-genius-of-a-friend explained it was fairly easy for him because B didn’t really cover her tracks well. In creating the profiles, she had put her location complete with zipcode and he later confirmed her identity by the password she used. Case closed. The unfortunate thing is, not all cybercriminals are amateurs like her. If you are pretty clueless about I.T. and this happens to you, just what do you do?
It can be argued that our laws may be broad enough to accommodate instances of “modern crime,” such as this. Nonetheless, I can just imagine the difficulty entailed in proving the elements of the crime, especially when the judge is technologically-challenged. To complicate matters, it’s like trying to hunt down a terrorist in the borderless realm of the Internet – one who doesn’t play fair, and if he’s pretty good, the victim may never prove, much less, know his true identity. This is a problem not only for celebrities, but even for private individuals because there will always be psychos out there who can easily take advantage of the Net’s convenience and anonymity to further their nefarious purposes. My friend never did anything to retaliate. She doesn’t need to, anyway. B has suffered a fate far worse than unwittingly being advertised as a mail-order bride -- that is, actually being married to a guy who will never love you back.
It can be argued that our laws may be broad enough to accommodate instances of “modern crime,” such as this. Nonetheless, I can just imagine the difficulty entailed in proving the elements of the crime, especially when the judge is technologically-challenged. To complicate matters, it’s like trying to hunt down a terrorist in the borderless realm of the Internet – one who doesn’t play fair, and if he’s pretty good, the victim may never prove, much less, know his true identity. This is a problem not only for celebrities, but even for private individuals because there will always be psychos out there who can easily take advantage of the Net’s convenience and anonymity to further their nefarious purposes. My friend never did anything to retaliate. She doesn’t need to, anyway. B has suffered a fate far worse than unwittingly being advertised as a mail-order bride -- that is, actually being married to a guy who will never love you back.
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