New troll scam: pay us $495 or face felony charges and jail time | Hacker News Reader

New troll scam: pay us $495 or face felony charges and jail time

arstechnica.com

89 pointsSuraj-Sun24 comments

> 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.

Scrap "Call me maybe" comments in YouTube; filter only the people in the USA and convert every username into a hotmail and gmail address (e.g. username@gmail.com) and send them treating emails. Profit.

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)

Reminds me of those "you have downloaded p-rn, buy xyz product to erase all your tracks otherwise your..." ads. How did they know :) ?

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

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

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.

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

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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

Modern-day indulgence?

Where are you from, vacri?

Melbourne, Aus.

Similar scam happening over in Australia at the moment too:

http://www.afp.gov.au/media-centre/news/afp/2012/october/afp...

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.

The AG should be prosecuting. The trolls...

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

> 3) Go to jail

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

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