Brit police jump to a confusion, arrest the wrong guy

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,346577,00.html


Identity Theft Leads to Child-Porn Arrest Nightmare


Friday , April 04, 2008

FC1

It's every Internet user's worst nightmare.

Simon Bunce of Hampshire, England, not only had his credit-card number
stolen online but was arrested and falsely accused of being a pedophile when
that card number was used to buy child pornography.

Before you think "that's a clever excuse," the story has a somewhat happy
ending, as Bunce eventually was fully cleared by police.

Yet that only came after he'd lost his $250,000-a-year job, his father and
siblings stopped talking to him and his computer was taken away for several
months, the BBC reports.

.

However, whereas the Americans used the names to cajole U.S. customers to
buy more kiddie porn and then arrested them, the Brits put the cart before
the horse and in early 2002 began simply rounding up everyone in the U.K. -
about 7,200 people - whose card numbers showed up on the list.

.

Bunce was arrested "on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children,
downloading indecent images of children and incitement to distribute
indecent images of children" - all before a single image of such had been
found on his computers at home and at work.

He quickly found himself unemployed and estranged from his family. But his
wife stuck by him, and while his computer sat in police custody waiting to
be examined, Bunce took action.

"I knew there'd been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate
it," he said.

Bunce used the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and a catalog of Internet
Protocol addresses to establish that his credit-card number had been used in
Jakarta, Indonesia, to buy child pornography online at the same moment he
used the card to pay the bill at a London restaurant.

He also found that his card number had been stolen from a popular
online-retail site, though he wouldn't say which one.

Finally, after several months, the police admitted what Bunce already had
proven - he was innocent, and there was no evidence of child pornography on
his computer.

He finally got another job - selling computer-security services.

_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.