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0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Sep 30, 2002 | by Jim Bainbridge

FTC joins international effort to stop Net fraud

With scofflaws around the world finding the Internet rich new ground, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has joined an international effort to fight online crime, focusing on cross-border fraud in health care and e-commerce. In the first phase of the program, the FTC has joined forces with its counterparts in 19 countries to ferret out bogus health-related claims on the Net. The agencies have thus far identified more than 1,400 Web sites that have made potentially fraudulent claims.

In March, researcher Gartner Group estimated online credit card fraud alone totaled $700 million, with some of the scams originating from as far off shore as the former Soviet republics and Southeast Asia. The top two U.S. consumer complaints last year were identity theft and online auction fraud; the FTC has created a new Web site (www.econsumer.gov) to make reporting such crimes easier.

www.ftc.gov

www.econsumer.gov

Google offering free news search function

Google, the popular Internet search engine, has launched a service for tracking news from 4,000 English-language sources, from The New York Times to small-town newspapers. Google News is accessible through a hot link on the Google start page and will pull real-time news from Web sites around the world. News is arranged under categories such as world, business, entertainment, technology and sports. If what you seek is not on the category page, you can type in the search terms at the top of the page and access stories that way.

Google is initially offering the news service for free, without any advertising support. It said it plans to see what kind of demand the site generates before it considers possible ways to make money from it.

www.google.com

Online news beats porn, survey says

Employees are far more likely to be addicted to news than to pornography, a survey has found. Websense, a San Diego-based firm that provides software to monitor Web habits at work, has found that news sites are the real Internet draw for employees. A little more than 20 percent of those surveyed said they thought news was the most addictive Web content, compared with 18 percent for pornography and 8 percent for gambling sites.

Nearly 70 percent of people admitted surfing news sites for personal reasons. Other retail sites were also popular, with 37 percent admitting they access shopping and auction sites from their desks. Only 2 percent confess to looking at pornography at work, although most companies block such online sites.

www.websense.com

Findlaw.com expands its business resources

Findlaw.com has expanded the business section of its Web site to help firms large and small deal with common legal issues. It has assembled thousands of new pages of helpful information regarding business law, including a library of legal articles, intuitive guides, forms and FAQ pages covering issues from starting a business to bankruptcy. Featured topic this week: "Guidelines for Handling Discrimination and Harassment Complaints."

http://biz.findlaw.com

- Bainbridge is The Gazette's online reporter. You can reach him at 636-0126 or online at bainbird@gazette.com