If you look on Google News this morning, you”'’ll find this headline in the San Fran Chronicle.

Yahoo Tool Finds Podcasts

Made me wonder who at Yahoo they were talking about, and how long he was looking.

I really wonder how many services Google can offer, and still keep a quality product. So far, they seem to have done fine, albeit with a few hiccups here and there. Google News, Image search, G-Mail, etc.

Now there’s Google Earth, a stand-alone application that serves sattelite images of streets, cities, hills, buildings - that sort of stuff - with surprising quality. You have to download the application and install it - PC only at this time, they don’t support Mac, but say “We’re working on it.”

Google Earth is pretty easy to use once you figure out how the controls work, and the base version is free. There are two other versions that cost money, including a commercial version that costs $400.00, but for my purposes, the free version works just fine.

In both Washington and Sacramento, FBI field offices are misleading you and I about what they’re doing to stop internet fraud. The fact is, most of your complaints will fall on deaf ears - or no ears. And unless you’ve been swindled out of 100,000 dollars or more, you’ll get little help from the feds.

How did I come to this conclusion? I heard it from the horse’s mouth.

– From the Beginning –

This little investigation started out as a favor to a friend. Long story short, he lost four grand plus on an eBay scam, and didn’t know what to do. eBay was less than helpful, and Western Union (the conduit for the money transfer) was forthcoming, but of very little more assistance. So, being my friend’s “go-to geek”, I got the phone call.

It took me all of two hours to track down a spoofed e-mail address, original phone number and new phone number, physical address, relatives, and to leave a message on an answering machine in Seattle, Washington. I got an interesting reply from this person about a week later, but that’s not really relevant to what I’m about to tell you. What is relevant, is that I tried to give this information to the proper authorities. And that’s when things went south - way south.

– A Call to the Locals –

Obviously, when you want to report a crime, it’s best to start with the local police. The local authority, in this particular case, is the Yuba City Police Department in Yuba City, California. Now, I was pretty sure what kind of response I would get, but when I continued, I wanted to be able to tell the next agency that I’d followed the proper pathway to them.

The Yuba City Police explained that they had neither the resources, nor the jurisdiction to pursue this crime, and recommended that I call the California State Attorney General’s Office in Sacramento. Which I did on Tuesday, Sept. 27th.

– The First Referral to “The Fraud Website” –

The AG’s office in Sacramento said that they don’t handle these cases either, and that the FBI had a website where I could file a report. I never got past the person who answered the phone. And she said, “The FBI has a special division and their website is this…”

The URL of the website she gave me was www.ifccfbi.gov - the Internet Fraud Complaint Center. Please note a couple of things about this URL:

1. The domain includes the initials “FBI” as in Federal Bureau of Investigation.
2. The domain extension is a .gov which only government sites normally sport.

Both of these are meant to give the impression that this is a government website. It is not. But we’ll get to that…

Please note also, if you go there, that there are no telephone numbers or contact addresses. The only way to access this “agency” is by web-based form submission or e-mail. So, dutifully, I filed a report, but this lack of contact information threw up a red flag in my head, so I decided to check with the FBI field office in Sacramento to see what I could find out about the Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

– Second Referral to “The Fraud Website”: The FBI –

Upon calling the FBI in Sacramento, I was given a different URL: www.ic3.gov. This leads to a different index page, but the link to file a report sends you right back at the original site. Both are the same entity, if you will, and both give the impression that they are government agencies.

Along with this new URL, the person who answered the phone at the Sacramento FBI field office also game me two phone numbers for this “agency”.

1. 304-363-4312
2. 304-291-5165

Following up, I called the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, and discovered something rather interesting.

– The FBI Black Hole –

A very nice lady who answered the phone at the IFCC informed me that no phone inquiries or reports could be made, and that communication was available only through the website. Never being one to be this easily satisfied, I pushed for a few answers to questions like:

• Is this a government agency?
• Where exactly do these reports go?
• Who is responsible for following up on them?
• Where can I send the information I gathered in my investigation?

My call was quickly transferred to a supervisor named Mike Walker. A conversation with Mr. Walker started off well, but became more disturbing as the truth came out. These are the facts, as told to me by Mike Walker of the Internet Fraud Complaint Center. Get ready for something that probably won’t shock you (didn’t me) but might anger you nonetheless.

1. The Internet Fraud Complaint Center, with it’s .gov extension is not a government agency. It’s run by a private company.
2. This private company does not send these complaints to the FBI, rather they route them to local and state authorities. Mr. Walker explained that if these agencies do not take action or refuse to deal with the reports, the IFCC will go no further in referring the complaint.
3. Mr. Walker described his company as a “clearing house” for internet complaints.
4. The IFCC, according to him, is contracted to handle these complaints, and his instructions are to route them back down the legal food chain where they came from to begin with.
5. The personnel manning the phones and the website are employees of this private company, not the United States federal governement.

Mr. Walker began to get defensive when I asked why this website and his company were represented by the FBI and others as a “government agency” and not a private company. I also asked why it was not made perfectly clear that these complaints were not, in fact, directed to the FBI, but to local and state authorities who may not even look at them.

He admitted that he had nothing to do with that, and that his company was simply doing its job, and following instructions. The answer to the next question did not come easily.

“What agency do you report to? Who are you contracted with?”

Eventually, he said, “The FBI.”

I thanked Mr. Walker, telling him that my next call was back to the FBI. Upon hearing this, he quickly said, “Hold on a minute. Let me say this one thing to you.” He paused, “I would hope that our being here is more beneficial than our not being here.”

I replied, “I hope so, too.”

– The FBI Part 2: Only the Wealthy Need Apply –

Calling the Sacramento field office of the FBI for a second time, I was transferred to the duty agent to resolve my complaint. She refused to give her name, citing policy that agents do not give their names to complaint callers… more on this in a moment. For the sake of expediency, therefore, I will refer to the duty agent who was in charge at the Sacramento field office at 1:35 pm on Thursday September 29th 2005 as “Secret Squirrel”.

Agent Squirrel was sympathetic to my plight, and after being asked a couple of times, did admit that while the FBI does, on occasion work with the IFCC, they are not a government agency, and she confessed that she didn’t have an excuse as to why state and federal agents would represent it as one.

She also revealed that $4000.00 was not a significant enough amount of money for the FBI to even read the report. I asked her, “So, the average American citizen who expects action from the FBI will not receive it unless the amount is over, say, $50,000.00?”

Secret Squirrel replied, “Better think closer to $100,000.00. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, but it’s the way it is.”

Next question was why they don’t seem to care about the common person who’s losing 5-10K to a scam artist. She said that she took exception to that, and that the agency and its agents do care, but cannot pursue cases which they have no intention of prosecuting. I said that in the end, it comes out the same. She agreed that it did.

Agent Squirrel informed me that they don’t have the resources to look at every case that comes up, so they route them all through the IFCC where they are funnelled down the legal chain and away from the FBI. Only if there is a pattern that can be related to another crime will any of these reports be used by the Bureau, according to this duty agent.

At this point in the conversation, I asked whether the American people should know that their complaints were falling into a black hole. She said that there was nothing she could do about it. It is the way things are.

Then, I asked for her name. She refused to give it to me, stating that names are not given out on complaint calls. I asked for the head of the field office’s name. She refused to give that to me for the same reason. We hung up. When I called back and asked for a supervisor’s name, the lady anwering the phone refused to give it to me. I asked if it was a secret… she hung up on me. Truthfully, I probably deserved it for that question.

– The Big Lie: FBI Washington D.C. –

After thinking about it a bit, I decided to make a complaint at the national level - the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. The woman who answered the phone defended Agent Squirrel, saying that no agents are required to give their name due to security reasons.

She referred my call to a toll-free number and a website, saying, “"Agents are manning this website.” It was IC3.gov. When I challenged that, and revealed that I knew for certain that no agents manned that website, she put me on hold. No one ever picked up.

– Government Lies: No New Thing –

It’s not unusual for our government to lie to us. It happens every once in a while, in one form or another. But to disregard the average citizen because their loss does not seem significant, and further give the impression that a person is protected, all the while shuffling their complaints into an endless abyss of apathy is worse than lying. It’s demeaning, cruel, and self-serving.

The FBI and its subordinates should be forthcoming about the disposition of complaints, the threshold at which they will take matters seriously, and the level of protection a citizen can reasonably expect.

This little series of conversations has led me to one inescapable conclusion. The FBI considers the average citizen to be insignificant and bothersome. So much so, that it has created a black hole in which to toss their concerns. So much so, that the FBI will blatantly lie to avoid dealing with them. So much so that its agents will trivialize a crime that has been committed in order to rationalize to the victim their lack of action.

Mr. Walker of the IFCC said that he hoped that their existence was better than the IFCC not existing at all. I would submit that it is not… in fact, that it is far worse. The existence of the IFCC allows the FBI to walk away from the average case of internet fraud and pretend to the American people that their concerns are being addressed. The fact that the IFCC exists for the purpose it does is a travesty.

Hooray for the little guy.