Study looks to help police fight Internet crimes
By Sarah Krebs
Staff Reporter

Ronald Burns, an assistant professor of criminal justice, and his team say they hope to help police compensate for a lack of preparedness in terms of Internet fraud based on information they have gathered from a nationwide survey of law enforcement agencies.

The study began in the summer of 2001 and was funded by a $6,630 grant from the National White Collar Crime Center, Burns said. It found that a lack of resources and jurisdictional issues has hampered law enforcement agencies from effectively combating Internet fraud, he said.

“There has really been this talk about how much Internet fraud is coming,” Burns said. “We haven’t heard it from the law enforcement and how they are dealing with this.”

In 2001, the Internet Fraud Complaint Center recorded 16,775 complaints worth investigating that were forwarded to the local police department. Out of the departments that responded, about 54 percent had a staff of only one to five people working on the cases, Burns said.

Burns, who worked along with Keith Whitworth, a sociology instructor and Carol Thompson, an associate professor of sociology, said he wanted to document how unprepared law enforcement agencies really are.

The study proposed a centralized database for law enforcement officials and experts to share investigative techniques and resources for training, where judges and prosecutors could get information on other Internet fraud cases, and where different agencies could also collaborate more easily, Whitworth said.

“One of the questions was, ‘Where are you getting your information on Internet fraud laws and investigation techniques?’” Burns said. “There were way too many different sources to really find some consistency.”

The nationwide survey was sent to 2,344 law enforcement agencies and focused on 700 departments employing at least 100 officers, Whitworth said. These departments were at the local and county level and the general response was that the resources, training and staff are inadequate, he said.

“We are seeing more commerce on the Internet, and if we wait too long and let the bad guys get too far ahead, we’re going to be doing a lot of catch up,” Burns said. “They have to be concerned about street and traditional crime, but we can’t ignore this and pretend that it’s not really going on.”

Detective Kelly Ham said that over the past five years, TCU has had eight Internet fraud cases. In one case, more than $500,000 was stolen, he said.

“A few years ago an international student got on E-bay and listed high-price electronic devices and anyone who put in a bid he sent an e-mail saying, ‘You won, send me money’,” Ham said. “We started tracking it up and he had fraudulently misrepresented the sale of about $680,000 worth of stuff.”

TCU has firewalls to prevent outside breaches, and TCU Police work closely with Information Services to investigate Internet fraud cases, Ham said.

The study interpreted Internet fraud to include auction fraud, credit card theft, debit card theft, non-deliverable merchandise, investment scams and confidence fraud or home improvement scams, Whitworth said.

Other major problems are jurisdictional issues and inter-department and inter-agency cooperation, Burns said.

“Whether they expand the jurisdiction of the local municipal courts and departments or hire more people at the federal level, they need to overcome it,” Burns said.

Sarah Krebs