• silicon.com
• Management
• CIO Insights

By silicon.com, 3 March 2006 12:20

Bad Girls and Emmerdale star Claire King was this week the unlikely choice of celebrity to launch a project to sweep the internet clean of online scammers.

The aim of the sweep? To disrupt the efforts of scammers who make fools of five million people in the UK every year.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said that, along with consumer protection agencies from 21 other countries, it has been searching for misleading sites on the web.

The latest sweep has targeted homeworking schemes, which often charge up to £200 to register but then no genuine offers of work ever materialise.

Scam websites in the UK can be knocked out in several ways. Once a dodgy site is spotted, the OFT checks with Trading Standards and checks with the ISP to see if there have been any complaints.

The OFT can use its powers under the Enterprise Act to stop misleading advertising. It can also work "informally" with ISPs to take down websites that are clearly fraudulent as these will usually break the contractual arrangements with the ISP. Trading Standards has a range of powers, including those under the Trade Descriptions Act, to intervene.

So far so good. But when trying to bring down bad guys based outside the UK the situation gets a whole lot trickier.

As the OFT told silicon.com: "The OFT will only be looking at UK sites. Those found in other countries will be tackled by the agencies taking part in the sweep in those countries."

The 21 countries involved are part of the International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network.

And while 21 countries sounds impressive, this is made up of mostly European and North American nations, along with Australia and Japan.

Scammers do of course operate from these countries - but an awful lot of them don't.

Which means this "worldwide" sweep will only ever scoop up a portion of worldwide scammers.

This is not to say that the OFT should give up on trying to shut these people down. But clearly greater co-ordination around the globe is needed.

Perhaps by getting the star of a prison drama to launch the sweep the OFT is warning scammers - look out or you could get banged up.

But with the current standard of international co-operation on internet crime issues, most fraudsters will know this is as likely as one of the more outrageous plots of Bad Girls.