MALMO, Sweden – Over the 20-plus years in which the commercial internet has existed, a stunning number of half-clever souls have believed they’ve discovered a means to commit various crimes online, evidently reasoning a lack of laws specifically prohibiting their crime of choice means they are free to profit without fear of legal reprisal.
The foundation for this belief isn’t entirely irrational, as certain online crimes have proved difficult for authorities to prosecute, often due to the geographic limitations of jurisdiction and the difficulty of reaching beyond the borders of any given nation to bring the hammer down on foreign criminals.
What many of the would-be online criminal masterminds have failed to absorb, however, is within the country where they physically reside and across sovereign territories that cooperate across borders on matters of criminal prosecution, many of the difficulties facing law enforcement and jurisprudence evaporate, leaving cyber-crooks just as vulnerable to prosecution as any mundane, strictly brick-and-mortar lawbreaker.
A Swedish fellow named Dennies Petterson learned this lesson the hard way, earning a sentence of two and a half years in prison by operating a little extortion scheme using his porn site, newerotica.mobi, as a vehicle for shakedowns.
In addition to a more traditional subscription model, Petterson used IP data he purchased from a Swedish ISP to identify surfers who visited the site to watch free videos, then sent bills to those users, threatening to publish their names on an online “porn blacklist,” thereby revealing the videos they had watched and declined to pay for.
In structure, Petterson’s porn blackmail scheme resembled the tactics of copyright troll attorneys — except he lacked the legal “cover” copyright trolls enjoy by virtue of having some sort of legally coherent theory as to how and why they can take action against the recipients of their demand letters. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish court found “the plaintiffs were subjected to aggravated extortion in the cases where it is proven they received a bill of this kind.”
Five of Petterson’s associates also found themselves in varying degrees of hot water, with three receiving sentences between 12 and 18 months and two others receiving suspended sentences.
Petterson purportedly made decent money through the site for a time. In 2013, he told the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan he had made hundreds of thousands of Swedish kronor through the legitimate subscription aspect of the site. But by treading down the path of online blackmail, he all but guaranteed his downfall.
No matter how clever you think your online scam may be (as we’ll get to in a moment, Petterson wasn’t even remotely clever), however careful you believe you have been in covering or obscuring your tracks, if there’s profit involved there’s going to be a “money trail.” If there’s one aspect of investigation international law enforcement agencies have proved pretty good at, it’s following the money.
Another thing authorities have gotten a whole lot better at over the years of cyber-crime investigation is cross-referencing, looking for connections and correlations between IP addresses, email addresses, social media accounts and various forums. If you’re an online crook and you make the mistake of using any email address, profile or instant messaging account that can be traced back to your real name, real addres, or actual IP, you’re halfway to busted at the click of a mouse.
Of course, the biggest mistake people like Petterson nd Ross Ulbricht (Silk Road’s now-jailed founder) often make stems from an unfathomable inability to keep their fool mouths shut. Why, for example, would someone who operates a site like Silk Road announce his intention to start such a site in advance of its launch — on LinkedIn, no less?
It might have been easier to walk around in a t-shirt with “Conspire to Commit Felonies Now? Ask Me How!” emblazoned across the chest.
Petterson took shooting off his mouth to an even less understandable level by speaking to Sydsvenskan. Even if his comments didn’t amount to an admission of wrongdoing, speaking to the media still feeds the story and provides law enforcement with information to investigate.
If you tell a newspaper you’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars, for example, then the authorities know you should have paid a fair chunk in taxes as a result. What happens when they investigate your tax payments and conclude you’re hiding income? Even if the discrepancy can be attributed to simply exaggerating your income in the media interview, you will have piqued the curiosity of people whose job it is to stick their nose all the way up your ass, figuratively speaking.
Welcome to law enforcement’s radar, pal. It’s probably not the best place to be, particularly when you’re in the middle of running a half-assed criminal enterprise.
If you can’t make money running a porn site in a way that is at least arguably legal, you’re probably not clever enough to make money running one the wrong way — not without getting caught, at any rate. It’s an inevitability that somewhat undermines the point of undertaking your crimes in the first place, seeing as how the first thing the government is likely to do is take away all your ill-gotten gains, in addition to or in lieu of taking your physical freedom.
So, if you’re a half-clever webmaster who thinks he has stumbled across a bulletproof means of extorting web users out of their money without any risk of legal repercussions, to keep yourself from making a very bad and fundamentally life-altering decision, one your sense of morals and ethics apparently can’t save you from making, just remember this one simple fact: You’re wrong.
