[meteorite-list] "Rounding Up a Posse"

From: Robert Verish <bolidechaser_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:55:51 2004
Message-ID: <20020125025627.17177.qmail_at_web10402.mail.yahoo.com>

FROM: LA Times - January 24, 2002 - High Tech Section

"Rounding Up a Posse" - A bad EBay auction experience
spurs an ad hoc Internet manhunt by ordinary folk,
who, like frontier vigilantes, find themselves
skirting the law in their quest for justice.

By CHRISTINE FREY, TIMES STAFF WRITER

The posse dogging an online auction seller seized
control of his e-mail account, grilled his mother and
even assumed his identity in a nationwide hunt for a
man they believe swindled as much as $125,000 from
buyers through fraudulent Internet auctions.

The members of this squad are not federal agents,
police detectives or even private investigators. They
are salespeople and investment advisors and registered
nurses who say they were bilked online by the
35-year-old Arizona man and used the Internet to track
him down.

Like a modern vigilance committee, the 50 or so people
from Florida to Alaska seized the community-building
power of the World Wide Web both to prompt and to
preempt investigation by legitimate law enforcement
agencies. Although most have never met, members of the
group swapped information daily on a Web site and
divided up investigative duties--most of which also
were carried out online.

Such a rapid, wide-ranging response by ordinary people
would have been virtually impossible just a decade
ago, before the Internet gave anyone with a cheap
dial-up account instant access to e-mail and massive
public databases.

They are growing increasingly common, particularly in
the realm of online gaming, where players gang up to
mete out punishment to miscreants.

But like vigilante gangs of the American frontier, ad
hoc communities seeking justice on the electronic
frontier sometimes trample the very laws they seek to
enforce, as their quest for justice warps into a plot
for revenge.

[For the complete article, go to <http://www.latimes.com/technology/printedition/la-000006012jan24.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dpe%2Dtechnology>]

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Received on Thu 24 Jan 2002 09:56:27 PM PST