The other day I got a call from a local Danish police officer. This was nine months after I reported to the Danish National IT Crime Investigation Unit (NITEC) that our domain, direction.com, had been stolen. The local officer to whom the case had been referred was kind of sorry to say that he would not investigate the theft and that we would have to recover any losses through civil proceedings.
I explained to him that my counterpart was unknown so it would difficult to initiate proceedings – and that we luckily had recovered the domain through arbitration. In the end he said that his decision mainly had to do with the fact that IT crimes in Denmark are referred to local police authorities and that he did not have the necessary resources and tools to investigate the case. So the costs of him investigating the case would not be justified by the possible benefit.
I told him that my main reason for reporting the theft was to obtain peace of mind and to at least do something, and also that I knew that local police cannot do much when crime goes global – and that my hope is that there some day will be adequate resources for some kind of police force that is able to track IT crimes across boarders. As of now, criminals are far ahead of law enforcement … good for them, bad for the rest of us …
