International crime connections
THEY worked in cubicles made out of large cardboard boxes, the kind used to hold appliances. They had lined these with foam pads, apparently to muffle the background noise.
From these cubicles, 24 foreign nationals caught in Barangay Guadalupe, Cebu City last Monday allegedly called potential victims in a web of online blackmail and fraud.
Thanks to leads from Taiwanese and Chinese authorities, the National Bureau of Investigation’s (NBI) unit devoted to cybercrime tracked down and caught the 24. About 500 foreign nationals have reportedly been deported from the Philippines in the last five years after being caught in similar circumstances. (Related story, A2)
The same technology that has made it easier for people to connect are also enabling new forms of crime, like the recently caught group’s online blackmail racket and a recent spate of automated teller machine (ATM) skimming cases.
As if they didn’t have enough challenges to face, law enforcers and justice department agents have, in recent years, been dealing with a long list of cybercrimes.
As of 2013, anywhere from one to 17 percent of online populations in 21 coun- tries have fallen victims to cybercrime. That estimate comes from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which identified these four as the most common cases: online credit card fraud, identity theft, phishing (posing as a legitimate company in order to steal private information, typically by email), and unauthorized access to an email account.
Why some cybercrime suspects have chosen to operate in the Philippines, authorities have yet to confirm. Our guess is it’s probably not so much the quality of internet connectivity here that has drawn them, but the advantage of distance.
Local conditions play a part, the UNODC explains. “In many countries across all regions, the explosion in global connectivity has come at a time of economic and demographic transformations,” such as “rising income disparities.”
International cooperation helps greatly, as what we’ve seen in the latest arrests and the previous efforts to curb home-based child pornography and cybersex rackets in parts of Cebu. But for the police and justice department, these new forms of crime drive home the need for more training, cooperation with more tech-savvy organizations in the private sector, and thinking out of the box.