Lone e-tailer fights back against fraudsters

NEWS A UK e-tailer sick of receiving fraudulent orders for goods has established his own early warning system after complaints to the police, Yahoo! and Hotmail drew blanks. Andrew Goodwill runs UKComputerParts.com and over the last month has been struggling under the weight of orders from fraudsters emailing him stolen credit card details from Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Goodwill established www.yournicked.com because of the lack of response from Hotmail and Yahoo! Members of the site can send in email addresses which have been used fraudulently. This database can then be used to scan future orders to weed out known fraudsters. When an e-tailer comes across a suspected fraudulent order, the details are distributed among members who first have to agree to only submit genuinely fraudulent emails. The intelligence can then be shared to create a warning system if the email addresses are used again at any of the participating e-tailers. The email providers themselves insist it is not their problem. Yahoo!'s legal department emailed Goodwill explaining it shared his frustration. It said: "Yahoo! UK's email service is similar to BT's telephone service or the Royal Mail. If a user picked up his home telephone and ordered goods from you using a fraudulent credit card, BT would not be expected to cut off the user's phone line or to investigate the user's use of the telephone. "The law does not give such rights to service providers. Similarly, the Royal Mail would not be expected to stop their postman from delivering mail to the user's house." But this doesn't help Goodwill - he still has to waste time ringing through every order to check it's genuine. After much sweat and toil, Goodwill has also managed to track down his local Computer Crime Unit, which has agreed to collect the information. However, he remains unconvinced even this will stop the fraudsters from targeting his site.