UK Police Consult Cyberactivists
Link: UK Police Consult Cyberactivists
The Metropolitan Police are talking to cyberactivists to help in their campaign against online crime.
According to sources in the Metropolitan Police Fraud Alert Unit, the police are using certain cybervigilante groups as a source of information about online fraud.
The police are believed to be in contact with Artists Against 419, whose activities include consuming the bandwidth of fraudulant banking and lottery sites in an attempt to take them off the Internet, and Data Wales’s Internet Fraud Advisory. Both of these groups offer advice and tools on how to avoid scammers and list suspected fraudulent Web sites.
Collaboration with such groups runs against the police’s traditional position of discouraging vigilantism. However, funding and resourcing pressures have caused the police to consider alternative sources of information. The police do not, however work with groups suspected of illegal methods of vigilantism.
