eBay cracks down on Romanian con artists

Online auction site eBay has made public the details of a three-year-long campaign to curb online fraud being perpetrated by criminals in Romania - an effort that has resulted in several hundred arrests.

Matt Henley, a member of eBay's US-based Fraud Investigations Team, spoke about the campaign while taking part in a two-day workshop in Sydney, Australia with representatives of local law enforcement agencies.

The ecommerce site's internal fraud team first took note of a higher than usual amount of fraudulent activity from Eastern Europe in 2005.

While schemes varied, many of these criminals committed fraud after approaching eBay users that had narrowly lost an auction.

Henley explained: "The fraudster can see that a user that didn't win was prepared to spend AU$145 on a particular item. They would then attempt to contact the user off the eBay platform to offer them a second chance. The number one goal of these fraudsters was to pull users off of eBay - away from our security cameras so to speak."

The fraudsters would first have to guess the emails of the losing bidders - most commonly by combining their eBay username with popular webmail domains.

The scale of the fraud was such that eBay formed a dedicated team to look into the issue - hiring a crack team of analysts and lawyers to work with victims and the Romanian authorities to come up with some solutions.

The eBay team first took an education role - running road shows for law enforcers, and conducting a two-day course with the National Institute of Magistrates in Bucharest in conjunction with Visa and Mastercard.

Next, eBay attempted to address resourcing issues to fight cybercrime in the small East European state.

Romania tends to base its resource allocation on population - so most of its law enforcement efforts in the country had been concentrated on its capital, Bucharest. But most of the cases were coming from smaller towns, where the eBay team sometimes found backlogs of 200 eBay-related fraud cases.

Henley said: "The police presence in these towns often didn't even have an internet connection. Some were using the same internet cafes as the criminals, which was of grave concern to us."

The Romanian Police Force thus became the lucky recipients of donated internet connections, computer equipment and digital cameras, courtesy of eBay.

Since the campaign began three years ago, Henley claims that eBay has helped the Romanian authorities make "several hundred arrests" related to online fraud.

Brett Winterford writes for ZDNet Australia