back to article Spammers, phishers escape proper punishment

Australia has no data describing the sentences imposed upon criminals convicted of crimes enabled by phishing and similar scams and no guidelines for sentencing such crimes, leaving Judges with little guidance to fashion effective and appropriate punishments. That's the thrust of a paper from the Institute of Criminology, …

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  1. Magani
    Unhappy

    At the risk of being seen as a heartless barsteward...

    Villain X decides to run a scam that cons elderly couple A & B out of their retirement savings of $Q00,000.

    Why should the sentence be any different to what would be given from the bench if X had held up a store/bank/broken into their home and taken the $Q00,000?

    It's premeditated robbery no matter which way you look at it.

    Needless to say, IANAL.

  2. frank ly

    "... effective and appropriate punishments."

    Chop their fingers off !

    (I've recently been getting a slew of mobile spam texts and also some phishing attempts on an e-mail address that I've managed to share only with 'trustworthy' organisations for ten years now. I'm not in a good mood.)

    1. bugalugs

      Re: "... effective and appropriate punishments."

      Whilst I cannot agree with your punishment prescription, it must be recorded here that I too began receiving phishing emails ( purportedly from Westpac bank, ANZ bank, Paypal and some most definitely from 419ers) since *ahem* this site's inadvertent, accidental and hopefully never-to-be-repeated release of subscriber addresses a while back. My response has been to forward the offending emails to the security wonks at the falsely represented organizations ( usually spoof@ etc.) and to blacklist the source. The flow, never more than trickle-ish, is steadily diminishing. Well done, those security wonks, I say.

      To whichever reader(s) passed my address on, a pox on you, btw.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    UK Model

    In the UK, the theory is a crime committed online is no different to a crime comitted offline.

    In practice, it seems to depend more on the size of your pockets, and your relationship with the party of Government.

    In that respect, Australia is already 'aligned' with the UK, I'm told.

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