Where's the Police?
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a) Find out their street address b) Burn down the building Now people will pay attention. For the humor-impaired: This is a joke. Sad that people have to make this disclaimer nowadays...
Does your joke mean: People will not pay attention? I make my best to understand the joke.
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Does your joke mean: People will not pay attention? I make my best to understand the joke.
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Les mt wrote:
Any suggestions what realistic action I can take to try and stop the fraud taking place?
What have you been defrauded of?
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
I did not say we have been defrauded but the fraud is taking place using our names and contact details. We are caught up in the loop whether we like it or not :sigh: We are the ones that have to field the phone calls of the victims because they have cloned our contact details and have impersonated our company - to my mind this is a crime involving fraud, it seems to me the UK police don't have an obvious system of dealing with it.
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I assume it's a co.uk name, so I would also take it up with UK Domain Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) - Nominet[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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Thanks very much, its a dot com domain they have registered, very similar to our .co.uk domain
Well, then complaint should be sent to ICANN. https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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Well, then complaint should be sent to ICANN. https://www.icann.org/compliance/complaint[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
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Something to add to your lectures. If your students ever set up a business make certain to tell them not to use their home address as their registered business address no matter how enthusiastic they are to get to the start gate! My business partner did this when we initially set up (many years ago before the internet :-O ) and then quietly under the radar the UK decided to put all its records on line in public display. This is one of the side effects of ill-conceived pre GDPR policy, I don't ever remember them asking us if it was OK! Now if anyone feels aggrieved and want to blame us they have a name, town, street, and house number, it’s a bit of a nightmare. I was wondering how to track down their ISP - any ideas?
Les mt wrote:
My business partner did this when we initially set up (many years ago before the internet :O ) and then quietly under the radar the UK decided to put all its records on line in public display. This is one of the side effects of ill-conceived pre GDPR policy, I don't ever remember them asking us if it was OK!
No it was not under the radar: It has always been this way, and quite rightly too. Limited company records have always been publicly available. Making them accessible via the Internet was just the continuation of the previous status quo. This is nothing to do with "pre-GDPR". Even if the Internet had come along post-GDPR, these records would still be fully public. Why? Because limited company details are not private, should not be private, and never have been private. A limited company is not a person who can claim privacy (although it can be used as a legal person, but that's a different thing). When you and your business partner set up your limited company pre-Internet, your company data was already publicly accessible via Companies House and its branches. When Internet accessibility came along, nothing changed. What was public before was still public afterwards.
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I did not say we have been defrauded but the fraud is taking place using our names and contact details. We are caught up in the loop whether we like it or not :sigh: We are the ones that have to field the phone calls of the victims because they have cloned our contact details and have impersonated our company - to my mind this is a crime involving fraud, it seems to me the UK police don't have an obvious system of dealing with it.
Les mt wrote:
I did not say we have been defrauded but the fraud is taking place using our names and contact details.
Then they may well be defaming your company. Not that the police will care about that: It's a civil matter. The people who have actually been defrauded need to contact the UK police and/or their local police. Contacting police across national boundaries is not unheard of at all. I know of people who have been defrauded in the UK contacting both US and German police to report fraudsters. P.S. I should add that, from what I have seen, both US and German police have in the cases I know of (that is private, fraudulent high value watch sales) proven to be considerably more helpful than UK police. UK police have often said in such circumstances, quite incorrectly, that it's a civil matter (by which they mean that someone has 'accidentally' forgotten to pay or 'accidentally' not sent the item) rather than wanting to accept that the non-payment or non-delivery was intentional and obviously criminal.
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Brilliant! Thank you very much, seems like their ISP is in Phoeinix and are called "namesilo". Its somewhere to start. :)
Namesilo is a legitimate DNS hosting and web hosting company (I happen to use them myself, amongst others). They have a complaints procedure and you can tell them what is happening and that your IP is being used without your permission for fraudulent purposes. They should act on this information.
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Namesilo is a legitimate DNS hosting and web hosting company (I happen to use them myself, amongst others). They have a complaints procedure and you can tell them what is happening and that your IP is being used without your permission for fraudulent purposes. They should act on this information.
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Here is an interesting problem and I bet it’s not the first time this has happened! Ours is a 2-man development company, for the sake of anonymity I am going to use PQR instead of our actual company name, so I have PQR Limited with a web site of PQR.co.uk. Suddenly we start to receive phone calls from people in different countries who have paid for goods from what they think is our site and wanting to know when their purchases will be delivered! This is a bit of a surprise as we don't sell anything, we just use the site to advertise our services for hardware design and custom embedded software, there is no shop or e-commerce. It turns out that some scammer has taken a similarly named https domain of PQRltd.com so pretending to be our company, they have even copied my business partners name and contact details. They are offering for sale all sorts of high-priced consumer electronic products. The poor people duped by the site having thought they made a purchase do not receive any goods, its blatant robbery. In the UK we have actionfraud.police.uk and reporting this crime to them results in a comforting message of: "The use of another person’s identity, often referred to as identity theft, is not a police recordable crime. Where the details are used to obtain goods or services, we can only record a crime on behalf of the person or organisation which was defrauded as a result of the misuse of an identity." To ease any stress that we might be feeling as a result of the above response involved they add.... "Whilst we have not recorded this matter as a crime, we will still make use of the information you have provided. Information reports are utilised to enrich the overall intelligence picture which assists with the formulation and refinement of prevention strategies." I am so happy to learn that in the UK identity theft is not a recordable crime and that the time wasted trying to research and report the problem (more than a day) has just served to enriched the picture. What a load of rubbish!:mad: Any suggestions what realistic action I can take to try and stop the fraud taking place?
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For several years now I'm lecturing teenagers about identity theft on the internet to help them survive... One of the things I've learned that even in countries with laws against, the bad guys lightyears ahead of the enforcers... The amount of the fraud communication is about 45% of all, which is actually burry every effort to stop it... Looking into the UK's laws - electronic identity theft is not exists at all. They have to take some of your documents (or fake it) to make the police actually recognize a crime... In your case it not even a real theft as the fraud site is only 'looks-like'... You may get some help for the ISP, that hosts the fraud site - but do not hope for much, they payed for it probably...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
Kornfeld Eliyahu Peter wrote:
Looking into the UK's laws - electronic identity theft is not exists at all.
From the perspective of the company. Don't forget there's a bunch of customers complaining about theft and fraud. Very real crimes. Police gets involved before the numbers gets so big they attract media attention.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Here is an interesting problem and I bet it’s not the first time this has happened! Ours is a 2-man development company, for the sake of anonymity I am going to use PQR instead of our actual company name, so I have PQR Limited with a web site of PQR.co.uk. Suddenly we start to receive phone calls from people in different countries who have paid for goods from what they think is our site and wanting to know when their purchases will be delivered! This is a bit of a surprise as we don't sell anything, we just use the site to advertise our services for hardware design and custom embedded software, there is no shop or e-commerce. It turns out that some scammer has taken a similarly named https domain of PQRltd.com so pretending to be our company, they have even copied my business partners name and contact details. They are offering for sale all sorts of high-priced consumer electronic products. The poor people duped by the site having thought they made a purchase do not receive any goods, its blatant robbery. In the UK we have actionfraud.police.uk and reporting this crime to them results in a comforting message of: "The use of another person’s identity, often referred to as identity theft, is not a police recordable crime. Where the details are used to obtain goods or services, we can only record a crime on behalf of the person or organisation which was defrauded as a result of the misuse of an identity." To ease any stress that we might be feeling as a result of the above response involved they add.... "Whilst we have not recorded this matter as a crime, we will still make use of the information you have provided. Information reports are utilised to enrich the overall intelligence picture which assists with the formulation and refinement of prevention strategies." I am so happy to learn that in the UK identity theft is not a recordable crime and that the time wasted trying to research and report the problem (more than a day) has just served to enriched the picture. What a load of rubbish!:mad: Any suggestions what realistic action I can take to try and stop the fraud taking place?
It is quite a common. We have an 'awareness' program for our staff. Unfortunately we don't have one for our customers. Not giving away out company name, lets assume we are Evil Corporation, and out domain is evil.com. Some bright kid registered evill.com; two Ls at the end. He then emailed one of our customers and said our banking details had changed. This is the customer's loss, because he still has to pay us. The domain was registered through a questionable ISP making it very difficult to trace the true owner. My advice to the customer was to have the police follow the money; into who's bank account was the money paid.
Nothing succeeds like a budgie without teeth.
