

New troll scam: pay us $495 or face felony charges and jail time - Suraj-Sun
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/new-troll-scam-pay-us-495-or-face-felony-charges-and-jail-time/

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daeken
> Interestingly, at least one poster acknowledged that she had in fact
> downloaded the music in question, suggesting that the scammers had collected
> real file-sharing data and connected it to peoples' real names and physical
> addresses. It's unclear how they managed to obtain the information.

I'm going to take a stab here and say that they picked a popular piece of
music and sent out letters about those. A decent portion of the population
will have downloaded this stuff, just by coincidence.

~~~
gizmo686
They might have looked at which IPs were downloading certain torrents. If they
are a branch of a large enough entity, they might have access to tracking data
to help associate IP addresses with real addresses (at lease a significant
amount of the time)

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aristus
They used certified mail for an extortion scam? Oh, man. Mail fraud is bad
news. Might even qualify for RICO prosecution.

~~~
wuest
Certified mail lends an air of legitimacy. Unfortunately for the scammers,
that's because senders of illegitimate mail are punished.

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darkchasma
So when some stupid kids extort money that they don't deserve in the name of
artists that never see the money, it's a scam. When the RIAA does it, it's
business.

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doktrin
Variants of this practice have been going on for quite some time.

However, past incidents involved actual user records subpoena'd from ISPs
based on IP addresses identified as sharing a torrent [1].

In either incarnation, it's ultimately shady and is (IMO) infuriatingly close
to blackmail.

[1] <http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20007446-261.html>

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mmanfrin
The irony of calling this a scam is that this is almost the same format as
RIAA/MPAA copyright violation notices.

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sliverstorm
First clue: $495? That sounds like a price you would pay in a store. The
government, in my experience, either bills you in round numbers ($500) or
strangely exact numbers ($493.12)

~~~
vacri
Where I am, civil penalties are set in a global unit, eg speeding ticket = 2
units. The unit itself is then set by the government - when it goes up,
everything indexed by it goes up. As the rationale for increases is often
'hey, inflation', it pretty much rules out round numbers.

~~~
sliverstorm
Sure, which is where the second case comes in. I've just never seen such a
retail-like price in gov't.

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jlgreco
Your first speeding ticket, only $99.99! Buy now, they're going fast!

But yeah, that's a good observation. One of those little clues that you would
hope people catch onto.

~~~
DrJ
Might be a good idea, pre-purchase your speeding ticket before you go speeding
today.

~~~
r00fus
Modern-day indulgence?

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elliotanderson
Similar scam happening over in Australia at the moment too:

[http://www.afp.gov.au/media-
centre/news/afp/2012/october/afp...](http://www.afp.gov.au/media-
centre/news/afp/2012/october/afp-logo-used-in-online-scam.aspx)

[http://malwaretips.com/blogs/australian-federal-police-
virus...](http://malwaretips.com/blogs/australian-federal-police-virus/)

It's a virus that locks the computer, takes a photo of the user and demands
they pay $xxx to a department of the Australian Federal Police for "detected
copyright infringement" while listing some of the music files on the computer
to lend credence to the claim.

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chris_wot
The AG should be prosecuting. The trolls...

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smartwater
The site looked like this: <http://i.imgur.com/WBnzpzS.png>

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kilroy123
I just can't go over how bad their website looks!

<http://www.copyrightlawenforcement.com/home.aspx>

~~~
laymil
At this point it just says "Effective immediately, the Internet Copyright Law
Enforcement Agency has ceased operations. Please disregard any notices you
received from us, and please do not send us any payments."

Too much publicity?

~~~
laurent123456
lol, the promoted comment on Arstechnica sums it up well:

> 1) Impersonate law enforcement to extort money from file sharers

> 2) Profi... OH S __T! NEVER MIND! WE WERE JUST KIDDING!

> 3) Go to jail

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b1daly
It's like a recursive loop of bad karma copyright trolling!

