Agencies in turf battle over fighting online fraud

In a turf battle that could determine which federal agency takes the lead in fighting certain Internet crimes, the online fraud units of the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission no longer share information with each other about their efforts to crack down on scams, said top officials at the two agencies. Last week, when the FBI and its Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC) announced "Operation Cyber Loss" and filed criminal charges against 90 people engaged in online fraud, they trumpeted the support of law enforcement officials from more than a dozen city, state and federal agencies. The FTC was conspicuously missing from the lineup. Although the agency's Bureau of Consumer Protection has assembled the most extensive and up-to-date record of online fraud in its Consumer Sentinel--a Web site with more than 300,000 complaints about Internet scams--officials at the IFCC said the FTC has barred them from looking at the database. But FTC officials said it is the FBI that is being uncooperative. Consumer Sentinel is open to all law enforcement officers, said Eileen Harrington, associate director of marketing practices. That includes any FBI officials detailed to the IFCC, a West Virginia-based data-collection center operated by the nonprofit National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C). Although consumers can report complaints on the Consumer Sentinel site, access to the database itself is restricted because law enforcement officers frequently use the system to tip off other agencies about their ongoing investigations. By contrast, the IFCC's Web site is not accessible by others, even though consumers also may use it to report complaints. Mark Gage, associate deputy director of the NW3C, said the IFCC sends the information directly to the relevant law enforcement agencies--generally by mail or by fax--because many state police officers do not monitor the Web. "The main difference between the two is that if a consumer files a complaint with the FTC, it sits in FTC's database until a law enforcement officer chooses to look at it and take some action," Gage said. "Our system takes the complaint and refers it directly to the agency." But Harrington noted that the FTC system permits law enforcers to use an auto-reply feature allowing e-mail notification of any complaints that may fall into their jurisdiction. She also said the FBI has failed to provide any of the complaints the IFCC received to Consumer Sentinel in spite of a May 2000 memorandum of understanding that the agency do so. "Not only did they not communicate, when we contacted them, they said that their instructions were to put everything that should be sent to the FTC in a drawer," Harrington said. "While we are very pleased that the FBI has taken a variety of initiatives to join us in fighting fraud on the Internet, the commission has had some concern that the public is not necessarily best served with agencies [that] duplicate each others' efforts," she said.