Computer-based crime: trends, prevention, and legal frameworks

Computer-Based Crime

The illegal site I reviewed for this assignment is www.howtogrowmarijuana.com. This site covers virtually all aspects of marijuana growing -- which is an illegal activity because marijuana is widely outlawed in the United States. However, there are some states in which individuals can legally consume marijuana for medicinal purposes. In these states and others there exists the potential for businesses to legally supply this substance to people.

There is a large degree of transparency in this particular web site. It was the first result to appear with a Yahoo search for "How to grow marijuana." As the tile of the site suggests, it discusses many different facets of growing marijuana and stratifies this process according to location (indoor or outdoors), various strains of marijuana including seeds (No author, 2014), irrigation and growth systems involving hydroponics, and other germane equipment types such as the expensive lights used to assist marijuana growth. There are also a host of other valuable resources such as links to additional sites that provide information about marijuana growing and its paraphernalia. Additional topics covered including growing this plant in boxes and in tents, while there is also a community forum with which visitors can interact with one another and obtain further information. This site is extremely open and transparent. In addition to getting good results from search engines, it also leverages videos from Youtube and sells books and other resources related to growing marijuana. It is not attempting to hide any aspect of its business.

It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly should be done about this site for the simple fact that there are some states in which people can legally grow this substance for medical purposes. Therefore, sites such as this one and others are actually providing critical resources and knowledge to people who are in actuality assisting the health industry. Nonetheless, the site is accessible to people in locations in which medical marijuana is not legalized, and they can still view it and utilize the information contained within it for illegal purposes. Subsequently, the ideal solution to this quandary is that those in states without legalized medical marijuana should be punished for visiting it by the Drug Enforcement Agency and the National Security Association, especially since the latter has access to data from internet users (Faris, 2013).

Part II

The legitimate site that I have chosen to explore for this assignment is Craigslist. This is a very popular and widely used site for a variety of purposes. Essentially, Craigslist functions as a medium to bring people together to effectively broker different transactions. The way the site works is people who are looking for someone else to provide a product or a service post advertisements for the specific things they are looking for. People who are seeking opportunities to supply goods or services can visit this site and respond to advertisements, and then discuss the process of assenting with the desires of the first party in a way that is mutually beneficial to both people. Legitimately, Craigslist is used for a variety of purposes such as the buying and selling of cars, the purchasing and renting of property, as well as the hiring of individuals to work for jobs. There are even personal ads on Craigslist where people can legitimately find mates, friends, or people to fulfill other roles in their lives.

Nonetheless, it is valuable to realize that nearly all of the important legitimate uses of Craigslist have the potential to be exploited by criminals for illicit purposes. Like many other applications of the internet, there always exists the potential for misrepresentation and fraudulent behavior -- either on the part of the person posting the ad or on the part of the person responding to it. In most of the egregious cases in which Craigslist has been used to conduct criminal, fraudulent activity, the individual posting the advertisement is misrepresenting some aspect of that ad. In addition to people looking to commit fraud and sell goods and services that are not what they claim to be, Craigslist can also be utilized for the purposes of human trafficking and prostitution. Also, it is possible for people to sell illegal substances such as narcotics (Romero, 2011) under various aliases on this site as well.

It is important to mention that it does not appear that the owners of Craiglist are complicit in whatever illicit activity may be taking place on its site. In fact, there are a number of steps that it has taken to actively discourage such illegal activity. Job postings frequently include a disclaimer stating that it is unnecessary for those seeking work to have to pay a fee to obtain a position of employment. It contends that any positing asking people to pay for a position is likely fraudulent, and even contains email addresses which people can utilize for the purposes of reporting such posts. There are some posts that have been removed for this reason.

Conclusion

There are myriads of different forms that internet-based crime can take. The most frequently occurring of these are those which involvement fraudulent activity. This statement is true largely because of the nature of the internet itself, which enables communication without any sort of physical context or confirmation. As such, there is a reliance on visuals such as photographs and even videos, in which viewers have no means of verifying whether or not what they see is actually truly possessed and made available from the person who purports to be offering or selling it. There are also a number of instances in which credit and financial crimes can occur, such as money laundering. Most organizations keep some sort of accounting of personal financial information of their clients in a computer system which typically is accessible through the internet. A criminal would only need to access that information before using it for his or her own illegal purposes. This same concept applies to identify theft as well, which can include financial information but also other, more valuable personal identifiable information such as driver's license information or federal and state-issued identification numbers. As the Craigslist example indicates, illegal substances like narcotics can be bartered and sold on the internet, which can also facilitate crimes such as prostitution and human trafficking.