Business Crime

Grantham University

Business Law

May 20 2014

Numerous forms of crime occur in a business context. Many of these to as white-collar crimes. The term is used to mean an illegal act or series of acts committed by an individual or business using some nonviolent means to obtain a personal or business advantage. Some of these crimes involves white collar property crimes, cybercrimes and violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act that affect businesses (“Business Law Text and Exercises”).

I will consider the current event below to be a cyber-crime involving computers which was taken to the court, but no one was caught.

WASHINGTON — Consumer frauds often make claims that are too good to be true. But a recent one, cited by regulators around the world Wednesday, depended on a pitch that many people found completely believable — that Microsoft or another computer company knows what is on your personal computer.

The Federal Trade Commission announced a multinational crackdown on so-called tech support scams, in which a caller fools a consumer into believing Microsoft or a computer security company has discovered that a PC is infected with harmful software. The caller then offers to fix the computer on the spot for a price. The target would sometimes let the ostensible tech support company gain remote access to his computer, allowing the company to download software to it.

In six cases filed in federal district court in Manhattan, the commission named 17 individuals and 14 companies, most in India, as participants in the operations, including many with legitimate-sounding names like Virtual PC Solutions and Zeal IT Solutions.

That program, known as “Event Viewer,” displays logs of operating-system events, which can sometimes carry the benign label “Warning” or “Error.”

The caller would then warn that those files indicated viruses that could crash the computer or, in at least one case studied by the F.T.C., that the computer could...