Vladimir Urošević – Zvonimir Ivanović

THE ROLE OF INTERNET IN HIRING A THIRD PARTY TO TAKE OVER GOODS AND MONEY UNLAWFULLY ACQUIRED BY COMMITTING HIGH TECHNOLOGY CRIMES

Summary

Hiring a third party to raise goods and money unlawfully acquired by committing crimes in the field of high technology criminality, has become a global widespread phenomenon with the appearance of internet. During crime-solving and locating of those persons, the larger number of them cannot give valid information (and sometimes any information at all) on a true perpetrator. In hiring individuals for this role, crime perpetrators use various methods and often they use methods of social engineering to make those individuals believe they were doing legal business. The perpetrators of those crimes use chat room options on the internet, social networks, false advertisements and profiles. They also use information and contact addresses that users left on the internet by themselves sending their biographies to apply for a job, web sites with possible personal contents or information from the web sites of their employing companies, institutions and other organizations (official web sites). The ways of hiring persons to take over goods and money varied a lot, as well as the forms of frauds, enabling full creativity of perpetrators in such cases. In this work, the authors point out to different patterns and methods used by the Serbian police and give broader analysis of perpetrators modus operandi and the way they approach to victims getting them into their net showing large diapason of fraud possibilities available to every perpetrator. The authors give us broader accounts of following types of frauds: work-at-home scams, fraud with redirecting of mails (Reshipping), fraud based on romance (Romance scams). After an overview on the mentioned types of frauds, it is given recapitulation of Serbian Ministry of Interior Affairs current experience in combating high technology crimes with the statistics from last two years. Analysis has been carried out through portraying perpetrators, victims (or hired third parties exploited for the crime), means and ways to commit the crime. The special attention is paid to one case from the practice concerning romance scams. On this example, the group of similar cases can be analyzed very well making important conclusions and the authors do that.

Key words: computer fraud, credit card fraud, "money mules", social engineering.