Stolen bandwidth? Call the cops
2008-09-19 14:01
Cape Town - Has your monthly bandwidth of 3GB suddenly dwindled overnight? You may be a victim of bandwidth theft, an easily investigated crime that the public aren't reporting enough, police say.
Stealing a person's bandwidth or internet time by fraudulently using their login and password has been a crime since the inception of the Electronic Communications & Transactions Act in 2002, Saps commercial branch Superintendent Jerome Hardenberg said.
"The Commercial Branch in the Western Cape took the lead in addressing this crime in June 2007," Hardenberg told News24.
But few members of the public were aware that they could file a charge at any police station, and that police can locate offenders within a matter of minutes.
Easy investigation
Hardenberg said underreporting of the crime was a pity, given that it was one of the easiest to investigate.
Offenders can be traced by subpoenaing Telkom for the location of the fraudulent login. "Telkom would then provide the IP address and physical address linked to the specific telephone number of the suspect," he said
The fraudster could then be fined anything between R1 000 and R5 000, given the amount of bandwidth stolen.
Hardenberg urged the public to report any such theft to their local police station. "A docket would be registered and allocated to the Commercial Branch for investigation," he said.
But more importantly, internet users should follow basic instructions by changing their modem password, and not using the default password.
Hardenberg said hackers know the default password of various modems and write programs to search for users logged on using a specific modem. "The info retrieved would give the hacker access to the account page with the user's login details," he said.
The information is then used to download content, which is sometimes shared with other hackers in chatrooms.
At this stage, victims could not be reimbursed for their lost bandwidth.