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Facing Cybercrime Charges
A cybercrime charge can create a trick legal situation that requires a combination of technical computer skills and legal defense skills. Cybercrimes can include many different activities including:
- Packet sniffing
- Saving an illegal photo to your hard drive
- Distributing copyrighted electronic information
- Using an old access code to retrieve your email from an ex-employer
- Conducting illegal business activities over the Internet
- Breaking into computers to fraudulently obtain information such as bank account numbers
- Spreading a computer virus
Computer hacking is any violation of the law involving computers.
Copyright theft occurs when someone republishes or reprints copyrighted material without permission or paying required royalty rights. While this is often a matter for civil attorneys, intellectual property theft can sometimes result in criminal charges.
The use of computers to produce realistic looking credit cards. This is where credit card fraud and cybercrime overlap.
Computers are also used in cyberstalking. For example, one man passed himself off as his ex-wife in a sexually oriented Internet chat room and created a Web site with nude photos of her that resulted in annoying phone calls to her home. The defendant was sentenced to one year in jail for stalking ater a judge rejected an ineffective lawyer's attempt to minimize the offense as a 21st century version of writing a telephone number on a restroom wall.
Political cybersquatting is now a crime in certain states including California. Violations include registering the domain name of a political opponent on the Internet to create a phony Web site or to sell the domain name for financial gain.
Internet fraud is a class of cybercrimes in which someone uses the computer and the Internet in a fraudulent manner to steal, destroy or otherwise render unusable computer data or to receive financial gain through fraudulent business practices. Common offenders include business opportunity and "work-at-home" schemes, investment schemes, online auction and retain schemes, market manipulation schemes and a variety of other schemes that misrepresent products or services over the Internet.
Internet fraud is sometimes called computer forgery. Forgery of computer data includes but is not limited to electronic mail, computer generated text and word processing documents, computer image and graphic data and any other computer generated document, record or representation.
A person is guilty of computer forgery (a felony) when, with the purpose to defraud or injure, the person:
- Alters, manipulates or deletes computer data that is contained in a computer, on a computer network, computer program or computer system;
- Initiates the transmission of computer data that has been altered, manipulated or deleted;
- Creates and possesses, with the intent to initiate the transmission of, computer data that has been altered, manipulated or deleted.
Defense Considerations
Cybercrime charges of all types should be taken very seriously. Sentencing tends to be quite severe in these types of crimes, and many of these charges are made in federal courts. There are a great number of sting operations conducted by the FBI intended to round up as many cybercrime charges as possible. For these reasons, you must be vigilant in your defense.
Defending cybercrime charges requires a thorough understanding of computer technology and the law. For example, some defendants have been in possession of illegal files on their hard drive without their knowledge due to the their Web browser cache settings or use of their computer by others.
Another consideration in defending against these charges is that the judge and/or jury involved in these trials tends to not have a deep understanding of computer technology and can often apply archaic pre-computer standards of judgment to cybercrimes.
United Defense Group specializes in cybercrimes defense and has extensivie experience in this area with a long track record of stunning results. Since cybercrime charges can sometimes lead to federal criminal charges or sex crime charges, it is important for your defense team to have strong experience in all of these areas of criminal defense. If you are facing any type of cybercrime charge or even suspect that you might be under investigation for these charges, call us at any time for a free consultation at (800) 459-2500. Early intervention is critical to obtaining the best result.
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