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Who Had Jurisdiction For This Matter?

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Who had jurisdiction for this matter? Was it the police in the United States where the victim (Citibank) was located? Was it the cops in St. Petersburg where the suspect carried out the alleged offense? Or was jurisdiction held in Israel or Finland, perhaps, where large sums of cash were electronically delivered to fraudulent accounts. Levin never physically entered the United States to commit the crime. He left no fingerprints or DNA and was never marked by an exploding dye pack. Importantly, he never needed to physically carry the thousands of pounds of cash out of the bank—it was all accomplished with a mouse and keyboard. No need for a mask or sawed-off shotgun either, Levin merely hid behind his computer screen and used a …show more content…

This ability to country-hop, one of the Internet’s greatest strengths, creates enormous jurisdictional and administrative problems for the police and is one of the main reasons why cybercrime investigation is so challenging and often feckless. A police officer in Paris has no authority to make an arrest in Sao Paulo.

The Good Old Days of Cybercrime

The nature of the cyber threat has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In the early days of the personal computer, hackers were mostly motivated by the lulz, or laughs. They hacked computer systems just to prove that they could do it or to make a point. One of the very first computer viruses to infect IBM PCs was the Brain virus, created in 1986 by brothers Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq, aged 24 and 17, of Lahore, Pakistan. Their virus was intended to be innocuous in nature, to stop others from pirating the software the brothers had spent years developing. Brain worked by infecting the boot sector of a floppy disk as a means of preventing its copying and allowed the brothers to track illegal copies of their own software. The brothers, upset that others were pirating their software without paying for it, included an ominous warning which appeared on infected users screens:

Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt). BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES 730 NIZAM BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN LAHORE-PAKISTAN PHONE: 430791,443248,280530. Beware of this VIRUS.... Contact us for

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