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Global Cops Crack Down on Top 10 'Dot Cons'

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Consumer protection agencies from around the world trumpeted on Tuesday their combined total of 251 law enforcement actions this year against what they called the top 10 ``dot con'' scams on the Internet.

Highlighting efforts to boost global cooperation against fraud on the Net, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unveiled 18 new cases, including six against a relatively new scheme it called ``Web cramming.''

Targeting small businesses and non-profit organizations, the perpetrators of this scheme offer to build a Web page for free, only to start placing unauthorized charges on phone bills of their victims.

The FTC said that in a web cramming case, one defendant, not immediately identified, will return more than $3 million to consumers.

``We want the 'dot con' artists to know that we're building a consumer protection coalition that spans the globe,'' Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said ``We aim to make the Net safe for consumers.''

The top 10 targeted online scams included auction fraud, service provider scams, Web cramming by supposed site designers and promoters, credit card abuse by information vendors and pornography operators.

Others were offers of business opportunities and ''work-at-home'' scams, get-rich schemes, travel and vacation fraud, telephone and pay-per-call frauds and health care frauds, the FTC said.