As you read this, hundreds of crooks are trolling the Internet for victims. Their get-rich-quick schemes clog e-mail inboxes and online bulletin boards.
Odds are they won't get caught.
An FBI-led Internet fraud task force received 49,711 complaints last year. Of those, 93 ended in arrests.
Local police see most Internet fraud as outside their jurisdiction; federal authorities see most of it as too small to pursue. In the wide-open world between, online scammers are making fortunes - and victims are losing more than $500 million a year.
Why can't authorities catch Internet crooks?
The Internet is such an efficient tool for fraud that a con artist can run a million-dollar scam from a closet, cheating thousands of people out of amounts too small to attract law enforcement's attention.
Government agencies and police are stuck with old-world budgets, geographical jurisdictions and antiquated laws - cumbersome tools to attack fraud on the anonymous, near-limitless Web.
Most complaints of online fraud are never investigated because no one agency is assigned to that task, said Mark Rasch, a national authority on Internet crime.
The most effective kind of Internet crime falls below the $100,000 mark, said Rasch. "It's too complex for the locals to investigate, and below the threshold where the federal government is interested."
Rasch ticks off a list of agencies that could have jurisdiction over a single Internet crime - from local police to county district attorneys to the FBI and federal regulators.
"Multiply that times 50," he said, because victims in each state complain to their own state and local agencies.
"You can see how it might get confusing."
The policies of Internet companies such as Yahoo and Hotmail hinder law enforcement. They often don't verify information about their customers or take other preventive measures against fraud, so law enforcers have trouble finding out who's running scams.
The recent investigation of Cole Bartiromo, a Mission Viejo, Calif., teen accused of swindling $1.6 million from investors in a phony sports-betting scheme, focused attention on the high profits of online scams.
But the fact that Bartiromo was caught makes him more an exception than the rule. The only reliable protection for a Net surfer is the old saying: Buyer beware.
Take Michael A. Furr. Furr, who lived in Coto de Caza, Calif., is accused of collecting more than $3 million in Internet profits in 1999 with what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission called a classic "pump and dump" scheme.
Armed with a Web site and calling himself the Wall Street Research Group, Furr touted more than two dozen "penny" stocks with e-mails, infomercials and on the radio, the SEC said.
Regulators said Furr did not disclose that the companies paid him with shares of those stocks - which he sold when the price spiked. Investors lost millions when prices cratered, the SEC said.
The SEC obtained a judgment against Furr for $3.4 million in profits, plus $420,000 in interest and penalties. So far, he hasn't paid a dime - and the SEC has no idea where he is, SEC officials say.
The majority of scams on the Net don't take in millions, though. They skim a few hundred dollars or a few thousand at a time, or they skim even smaller amounts from thousands of individuals all over the world. That makes them hard to investigate.
Federal agencies have tried to coordinate an attack on Internet fraud, with mixed results.
The Internet Fraud Complaint Center, founded in 2000, has no budget of its own and borrows its staff of 80 from the FBI.
It does not investigate crime but instead collects reports from consumers and forwards them to agencies that might have jurisdiction.
Most of the time, nothing is done with its referrals.
The center referred 16,755 complaints to law-enforcement agencies last year; three ended in an arrest, according to its annual report. Of the center's complaints, 71 percent involved losses of less than $1,000. About 20 percent of the complaints cited losses of less than $100.
There have been a few highly publicized successes. Ninety people were charged in last year's Operation Cyber Loss, a nationwide sweep based on data from the center and led by the FBI. The SEC sued Cole Bartiromo and Michael Furr.
But most victims will never even hear from regulators.
Lisa Gok, who runs the SEC's Internet enforcement branch in Los Angeles, says she has time and budget for only 20 to 30 Internet fraud cases a year. "We go after things that are of national scope," she said.
Even when the SEC does find fraud, the agency has no criminal authority. As the Furr case shows, the SEC can win a multimillion-dollar civil judgment but might never collect the money.
Meanwhile, the private companies that profit from the Internet - such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and others - know they lose many potential customers who fear being ripped off.
But still, many of those companies operate in a way that hampers efforts to curb fraud. Investigators often reach a dead end, because none of these services requires customers to use a postal address; an e-mail address and credit card suffice.
Even getting minimal information about Internet users can be cumbersome, said Irvine police investigator Tucker. Just getting a warrant and serving it on a company that's out of state can take weeks or months.
None of the online companies has a legal responsibility to police their Web sites for fraud, said Alikhan.
Despite that, the online services say, they do their best.
The eBay auction site, for example, has a fraud-investigation team that shuts down certain accounts. PayPal, an Internet money-transfer service that did $3.5 billion in transactions last year, has the same.
Still, Yahoo's message boards are jammed with lures, as are the online communities on AOL and MSN. Online payment services, such as PayPal, still make it possible to collect money from credit cards and checks without bank accounts or even a verified address.
Don't be a victim of Internet fraud
Here are some tips for avoiding Internet fraud:
Look for red flags: "instant profits," "risk-free," "guaranteed returns," "inside information," "must act now." Remember two pieces of common sense: There's no such thing as a free lunch, and if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Be careful of promoters who use aliases. Some salespeople will use multiple names to hype the same scheme.
Watch out for offshore investments. If you send your money out of the country, it will be hard to locate if something goes wrong.
Complaints or grievances filed against a company or someone selling securities can mean trouble. Always check a company's financial statements. For many companies, they are available online at www.freeedgar.com.
If a person isn't registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or your state securities regulator, they're not supposed to be selling investments. You also can check the salesperson's history at www.sec.gov. The National Association of Securities Dealers can give you a partial disciplinary history of a broker or firm at its Web site, www.nas dr.com.