Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce: results of the 2012 online consumer fraud survey

The Australasian Consumer Fraud Task Force has conducted a range of fraud prevention and awareness raising activities since 2006. This report presents the results of the 2012 online consumer fraud survey. Foreword Each year, since 2007, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has collected information on consumer scams by conducting an online survey of Australians who have received scam invitations during the preceding 12 months. The research is conducted on behalf of the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT), which is comprised of 22 government regulatory agencies and departments in Australia and New Zealand who work alongside private sector, community and non-government partners to prevent fraud of this nature. In order to understand the dynamics of consumer fraud victimisation, the ACFT has conducted a range of fraud prevention and awareness-raising activities over the last eight years. The annual survey seeks to obtain a snapshot of the public’s exposure to consumer scams, to assess the range of ways in which scams can affect victims and their families, to determine how victims respond and to identify emerging typologies and issues that could be used to inform fraud prevention initiatives. Survey respondents are not representative of the whole Australian population, as the sample is made up of those individuals who choose to participate, although in 2012, over 1,500 people completed the survey with good levels of representation from all states and territories, and other demographic categories. This report presents the results of the survey conducted in conjunction with the 2012 campaign, Slam scams! Press ‘delete’, throw it out, shut the door or just hang up. The campaign theme was concerned with scam delivery methods that focused on raising awareness about the many ways in which scammers try to deliver scam invitations. A phone call, SMS, mobile application, house visit, letter, email, fax, blog, online chat or dating service—scammers will use any of these means to target victims. The primary message was simple—stop the contact at the point of delivery; if you don’t engage with a scammer in the first place, you can avoid being scammed. As in previous years, a high proportion of respondents had received a scam invitation (95%), with almost a quarter responding to the scam in some way. Unfortunately, eight percent reported having lost money—approximately $8,000 per person or almost$850,000 in total. The most prevalent scam type involved fraudulent lotteries, while this year, the second-most prevalent scam concerned computer support scams, which are sometimes a means of extracting payments for non-existent services from victims or, on other occasions, a means of installing malicious software that can be used to extract personal information at a later time. In terms of delivery methods, although email continued to be the most common method by which scams were delivered, the use of landline and mobile telephones (including SMS) to target potential scam victims increased. This report also includes some additional information on online shopping scams—the subject of the consumer fraud awareness week in June 2013. The prevalence of scams targeting those who sell or buy high-value items online, such as motor vehicles, was high in 2012, indicating a need for enhanced awareness of the risks involved in this form of consumer activity

Identity crime and misuse in Australia: results of the 2013 online survey

Abstract: Identity crime and misuse of personal information affect all sectors in Australia and cost individuals, business and government many millions of dollars annually. In May 2013, in order to explore the nature and scope of identity crime and misuse in Australia, the Australian Institute of Criminology was commissioned by the Attorney-General’s Department to undertake a national survey. This report presents the results of the survey. The findings confirm prior research that has found that identity crime affects a relatively high proportion of Australians who report substantial financial and other impacts

Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets.

Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews with industry and law enforcement, and an analysis of an online blackmarket. Tickets are purchased by complicit travellers or resellers from the online blackmarket. Victim travellers obtain tickets from fake travel agencies or malicious insiders. Compromised credit cards used to be the main method to purchase tickets illegitimately. However, as fraud detection systems improved, offenders displaced to other methods, including compromised loyalty point accounts, phishing, and compromised business accounts. In addition to complicit and victim travellers, fraudulently obtained tickets are used for transporting mules, and for trafficking and smuggling. This research details current prevention approaches, and identifies additional interventions, aimed at the act, the actor, and the marketplace

Understanding eWhoring

In this paper, we describe a new type of online fraud, referred to as `eWhoring' by offenders. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the `eWhoring' business model, drawing on more than 6,500 posts crawled from an online underground forum. This is an unusual fraud type, in that offenders readily share information about how it is committed in a way that is almost prescriptive. There are economic factors at play here, as providing information about how to make money from `eWhoring' can increase the demand for the types of images that enable it to happen. We find that sexualised images are typically stolen and shared online. While some images are shared for free, these can quickly become `saturated', leading to the demand for (and trade in) more exclusive `packs'. These images are then sold to unwitting customers who believe they have paid for a virtual sexual encounter. A variety of online services are used for carrying out this fraud type, including email, video, dating sites, social media, classified advertisements, and payment platforms. This analysis reveals potential interventions that could be applied to each stage of the crime commission process to prevent and disrupt this crime type.This work was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [grant EP/M020320/1] and by the Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under the project CYNAMON (P2018/TCS-4566), co-financed by European Structural Funds (ESF and FEDER)

Genomic reaction norms inform predictions of plastic and adaptive responses to climate change

Genomic reaction norms represent the range of gene expression phenotypes (usually mRNA transcript levels) expressed by a genotype along an environmental gradient. Reaction norms derived from common-garden experiments are powerful approaches for disentangling plastic and adaptive responses to environmental change in natural populations. By treating gene expression as a phenotype in itself, genomic reaction norms represent invaluable tools for exploring causal mechanisms underlying organismal responses to climate change across multiple levels of biodiversity. Our goal is to provide the context, framework and motivation for applying genomic reaction norms to study the responses of natural populations to climate change. Here, we describe the utility of integrating genomics with common-garden-gradient experiments under a reaction norm analytical framework to answer fundamental questions about phenotypic plasticity, local adaptation, their interaction (i.e. genetic variation in plasticity) and future adaptive potential. An experimental and analytical framework for constructing and analysing genomic reaction norms is presented within the context of polygenic climate change responses of structured populations with gene flow. Intended for a broad eco-evo readership, we first briefly review adaptation with gene flow and the importance of understanding the genomic basis and spatial scale of adaptation for conservation and management of structured populations under anthropogenic change. Then, within a high-dimensional reaction norm framework, we illustrate how to distinguish plastic, differentially expressed (difference in reaction norm intercepts) and differentially plastic (difference in reaction norm slopes) genes, highlighting the areas of opportunity for applying these concepts. We conclude by discussing how genomic reaction norms can be incorporated into a holistic framework to understand the eco-evolutionary dynamics of climate change responses from molecules to ecosystems. We aim to inspire researchers to integrate gene expression measurements into common-garden experimental designs to investigate the genomics of climate change responses as sequencing costs become increasingly accessible.publishedVersio

Genomic reaction norms inform predictions of plastic and adaptive responses to climate change

Genomic reaction norms represent the range of gene expression phenotypes (usually mRNA transcript levels) expressed by a genotype along an environmental gradient. Reaction norms derived from common-garden experiments are powerful approaches for disentangling plastic and adaptive responses to environmental change in natural populations. By treating gene expression as a phenotype in itself, genomic reaction norms represent invaluable tools for exploring causal mechanisms underlying organismal responses to climate change across multiple levels of biodiversity. Our goal is to provide the context, framework and motivation for applying genomic reaction norms to study the responses of natural populations to climate change. Here, we describe the utility of integrating genomics with common-garden-gradient experiments under a reaction norm analytical framework to answer fundamental questions about phenotypic plasticity, local adaptation, their interaction (i.e. genetic variation in plasticity) and future adaptive potential. An experimental and analytical framework for constructing and analysing genomic reaction norms is presented within the context of polygenic climate change responses of structured populations with gene flow. Intended for a broad eco-evo readership, we first briefly review adaptation with gene flow and the importance of understanding the genomic basis and spatial scale of adaptation for conservation and management of structured populations under anthropogenic change. Then, within a high-dimensional reaction norm framework, we illustrate how to distinguish plastic, differentially expressed (difference in reaction norm intercepts) and differentially plastic (difference in reaction norm slopes) genes, highlighting the areas of opportunity for applying these concepts. We conclude by discussing how genomic reaction norms can be incorporated into a holistic framework to understand the eco-evolutionary dynamics of climate change responses from molecules to ecosystems. We aim to inspire researchers to integrate gene expression measurements into common-garden experimental designs to investigate the genomics of climate change responses as sequencing costs become increasingly accessible.publishedVersionpublishedVersionPaid Open Acces

Observation of the Arctic sea ice condition in 2012 summer - from JOIS2012 cruise -

第3回極域科学シンポジウム/特別セッション「これからの北極研究」11月28日（水） 国立極地研究所 2階大会議

Displacing big data: How criminals cheat the system

Abstract: Many technical approaches for detecting and preventing cy-bercrime utilise big data and machine learning, drawing upon knowledgeabout the behaviour of legitimate customers and indicators of cyber-crime. These include fraud detection systems, behavioural analysis, spamdetection, intrusion detection systems, anti-virus software, and denial ofservice attack protection. However, criminals have adapted their meth-ods in response to big data systems. We present case studies for a numberof different cybercrime types to highlight the methods used for cheatingsuch systems. We argue that big data solutions are not a silver bulletapproach to disrupting cybercrime, but rather represent a Red Queen'srace, requiring constant running to stay in one spot

No Easy Way Out: The Effectiveness of Deplatforming an Extremist Forum to Suppress Hate and Harassment

Legislators and policymakers worldwide are debating options for suppressing illegal, harmful and undesirable material online. Drawing on several quantitative datasets, we show that deplatforming an active community to suppress online hate and harassment, even with a substantial collective effort involving several tech firms, can be hard. Our case study is the disruption of the largest and longest-running harassment forum Kiwi Farms in late 2022, which is probably the most extensive industry effort to date. We collected complete snapshots of this site and its primary competitor Lolcow Farm, encompassing over 14.7M posts during their lifespan over the past decade. These data are supplemented with a full scrape of the Telegram channel used to disseminate new updates when the forum was down, tweets made by the online community leading the takedown, and search interest and web traffic to the forum spanning two months before and four months after the event. Despite the active participation of several tech firms over a few months, this campaign failed to shut down the forum and remove its objectionable content. While briefly raising public awareness, it led to rapid platform displacement and traffic fragmentation. Part of the activity decamped to Telegram, while traffic shifted from the primary domain to previously abandoned alternatives. The community leading the campaign lost interest quickly, traffic was directed back to the main domain, users quickly returned, and the forum was back online and became even more connected. The net effect was that forum activity, active users, threads, posts and traffic were all cut by about half. Deplatforming a dispersed community using a series of court orders against individual service providers appears unlikely to be very effective if the censor cannot incapacitate the key maintainers, whether by arresting them, enjoining them or otherwise deterring them

Cybercrime is (often) boring: maintaining the infrastructure of cybercrime economies

It is generally accepted that the widespread availability of specialist services has helped drive the growth of cybercrime in the past fifteen to twenty years. Individuals and groups involved in cybercrime no longer need to build their own botnet or send their own spam because they can pay others to do these things. What has seldom been remarked upon is the amount of tedious administrative and maintenance work put in by these specialist suppliers. There is much discussion of the technically sophisticated work of developing new strains of malware or identifying zero-day exploits but the mundane nature of the day to day tasks of operating infrastructure has been almost entirely overlooked. Running bulletproof hosting services, herding botnets, or scanning for reflectors to use in a denial of service attack is unglamorous and tedious work, and is little different in character from the activity of legitimate sysadmins. We provide three case studies of specialist services that underpin illicit economies and map out their characteristics using qualitative sociological research involving interviews with infrastructure providers and scraped data from webforums and chat channels. This enables us to identify some of the distinct cultural and economic factors which attend this infrastructural work and to note, in particular, how its boring nature leads to burnout and the withdrawal of services. This leads us to suggest ways in which this new understanding could open novel avenues for the disruption of cybercrime.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)