A great article in Wired Magazine’s Threat Level section that describes how a Chinese citizen from Macau named Chi Tong KUOK, among other aliases, was indicted for attempting to purchase NSA cryptography equipment.

The interest from an Internet investigations perspective? According to the article and to the attached indictment filed in California Federal court, much of the discussions between Kuok and his clients (who happened to be undercover operatives from the U.S. Department of Defense) occurred over email from multiple email accounts controlled by Kuok. Furthermore at least $1,200 of the payments made by Kuok to his customers were sent via Paypal (the other payments were made by good old fashion Western Union). Finally, according to the article Kuok attempted to purchase cryptography gear on eBay.

One of the comments in the article said “they only catch the dumb ones” but I would argue that these types of communication mechanisms and transaction facilities are probably used more widely than one might think.

As many readers are no doubt aware, a verdict has been rendered acquitting Lori Drew of violations of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This was the right verdict in my view simply because this act does not seem appropriate for this type of incident in the first place.

A good analysis of the case can be found on Evan Brown’s Internet Cases blog. As he states in the post many states are now enacting some variation of an “aggravated harassment” type law for the Internet which is more suited for incidents like this one.

There have been a few interesting reports from Australia over the last number of days.

First it has been reported in the UK Register that a 27 year old tech worker, who was the head of a bank in the MMORPG Eve Online stole 200 Billion ISK or “Interstellar Kredits” in deposits from other players. He then converted the ISK to real dollars on auction sites netting a windfall of about AUS$6,000 or US$5,000.

The amounts are not large, the damage to each individual player likely small, it may be against Eve Online’s TOS to sell currency outside of the game and it may be part of Eve Online’s gaming culture to have these kinds of scandals, but that does not mean that the individual did not convert the assets owned by someone else for his own benefit. It appears that the inspiration for the theft was his real world financial problems as opposed to simply trying to earn notoriety within the game.

In other happenings the financial intelligence agency of Australia, AUSTRAC has published its “Typologies and Case Studies Report 2009″.

In these reports the fun reading is in the case studies and this document is no exception. The report includes four cases that involve the use of the Internet to facilitate some aspect of a financial crime such as solicitation, conversion, etc. I won’t give the stories away as the case studies are published on line. Thanks to Mr. Gupta for forwarding this article on the subject.