Email Fraud Surfaces in West Virginia

"I have been hired to kill you……I watch you everyday since the past two weeks and I know where you go and when you come back and everything you do. Do not dare me….but pay the ransom, and I will let you go and even send you the pictures of the person [who paid for the hit.]”^[1] That is the text of an email that has been sent to dozens of people in an email fraud scheme discovered in West Virginia.^[2]

The recipient of this email was Paul Rowley, a 76-year-old retired coal plant foreman from Boone County, WV., was unsure of what to do so he forwarded it to his daughter, who, in turn, contacted the attorney general's office - and learned about an emerging internet scam.^[3]

"We started researching it, and that's when we realized that this sort of thing has been going around since 2006," Deputy Attorney General Jill Miles of the office's Consumer Protection Division said Friday.^[4]

According to the FBI, Rowley may be the first West Virginian targeted, however more than a hundred people elsewhere in the country have been similarly threatened; the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint effort of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, began receiving complaints about the scam in December and believes the e-mails come from outside the U.S.^[5]

"What's really frightening is that some of these people have gotten e-mails with identifying information, like the name of their child…but as far as I've been able to tell, no one has given any money," Miles said.^[6]

Attorney General Darrell McGraw issued a warning about the scam Friday, urging consumers not to respond to such e-mails but instead file a complaint with the Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3.^[7]

E-mail Fraud
E-mail fraud is covered under 18 U.S.C. § 1037. This statute makes it illegal for a person to, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly: (1) accesses a protected computer without authorization, and intentionally initiates the transmission of multiple commercial electronic mail messages from or through such computer;^[8] (2) uses a protected computer to relay or retransmit multiple commercial electronic mail messages, with the intent to deceive or mislead recipients, or any Internet access service, as to the origin of such messages;^[9](3) materially falsifies header information in multiple commercial electronic mail messages and intentionally initiates the transmission of such messages;^[10] (4) registers, using information that materially falsifies the identity of the actual registrant, for five or more electronic mail accounts or online user accounts or two or more domain names, and intentionally initiates the transmission of multiple commercial electronic mail messages from any combination of such accounts or domain names;^[11] or (5) falsely represents oneself to be the registrant or the legitimate successor in interest to the registrant of 5 or more Internet Protocol addresses, and intentionally initiates the transmission of multiple commercial electronic mail messages from such addresses.^[12]

Federal criminal defense attorney Douglas McNabb has previously written about the federal crime of Email fraud in his blog, here

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^[1] Lawrence Messina, Death threat e-mail scam hits W.Va., AG warns, Associated Press Newswire, August 31, 2007, available at available at LEXIS, News Library, Wire News Services File.
^[2] Id.
^[3] Id.
^[4] Id.
^[5] Id.
^[6] Id.
^[7] Id.
^[8] 18 U.S.C. § 1037(a)(1)(2007).
^[9] Id. at §1037(a)(2).
^[10] Id. at §1037(a)(3).
^[11] Id. at §1037(a)(4).
^[12] Id. at §1037(a)(5).