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Congress and Phishing are on colision course - Phishing is a crime that can happen to anyone. Essentially it is identity theft. Someone steals your credit card and your name in order to steal your money and potentially ruin your credit. Unfortunately, this crime is becoming so popular on the internet that congress is being forced to enact federal laws about the criminality of phishing.
There are currently a few laws going through congress that deal with internet crimes. Phishing is one the crimes that are being discussed. Currently, congress has passed the Anti-Phishing Act of 2004. The anti-phishing bill offers numerous forms of protection against phishing but most importantly it defines phishing as a federal crime.
The basic wording of the bill concerning phishing states that it is illegal to spoof or fake a website in order to request, ask, or solicit any person to provide means of identification to another person. This is a huge success for the internet community because this is basically what phishing is. Unfortunately, it will not stop people from doing it but it will see that they may end up accountable for their actions.
If someone is convicted under the law passed by congress for phishing they could risk spending up to five years in prison. The people convicted of phishing may also have to pay a $250,000 fine.
The Can-Spam Act has also been placed into effect. In this act of congress it states it is illegal to send mass emails or spam that contains any falsified information such as pictures or headers. This includes the “From:” field in an email letter.
Congress and Phishing has resukted in steps to see that people can be charged with phishing just for attempting the scam. It doesn’t matter if the phishers were successful or made anything off their criminal venture.
Unfortunately it can be very hard to catch people like this for a number of reasons. First of all there are hundreds of people out there that are phishers. Second they often try to keep a low profile for their website to ensure they are not easily found. This means it can take time to find and capture the criminal. Meanwhile, the people phishing are continuing to defraud companies all over the internet by stealing people’s information and using it for themselves.
From Congress and Phishing back to Anti-phishing.info