Standing falsely accused of any crime – especially one as stigmatizing as possession of child pornography – is one of those frightening prospects we’d all rather not contemplate. That gets more difficult, however, as examples keep piling up.the BBC has a chilling account of Operation Ore, a British child-porn investigation that uncovered some 7,000 credit card accounts among the customers of an American online smut operation called Landslide, which fronted a variety of Web sites that included both adult and child pornography.
Today,
It turns out that many of those card numbers had been stolen, according to the BBC report.
“They closed their minds absolutely to the possibility that this man’s credit card had been used illegally by a fraudster,” says the attorney for one of the accused, a man whose father had disowned him because of the allegations. Others suffered similarly.
Now those who have examined the case closely believe that at least hundreds of those originally accused were in fact victims of identity theft. The break came last year, according to the BBC:
But last year Jim Bates, a computer forensics expert who has worked as an advisor to Scotland Yard’s computer crime unit, got hold of all the Landslide records.
Within an hour he had begun to find evidence of systematic credit card fraud.
“It was that obvious … it just jumped out at you,” he says.
In January here we recounted the case of a 16-year-old Arizona youngster, innocent from every indication, who narrowly escaped going to jail over child pornography found on his spyware-infested computer.
And, of course, there is ongoing injustice involving the Connecticut substitute schoolteacher who faces up to 40 years in prison because she wasn’t able to prevent pornography from popping up on classroom PC.
Frightening stuff, no matter how much we might prefer to keep our heads buried in the sand.
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