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Privacy The Almighty Buck Your Rights Online

The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh 178

Posted by kdawson from the crawling-towards-an-audit dept.
Juha-Matti Laurio writes "A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected Internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated Web-crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites and to track operators of online shops, poker, and porn sites. Austria, Denmark, Great Britain, and Canada have joined The Netherlands in pursuing the 'Xenon' program with the assistance of an Amsterdam-based data mining company. Wired News reports that the Web crawler uses so-called 'slow search' to avoid creating excessive traffic on a site or drawing attention in the sites' server logs." The article notes that the US IRS will neither confirm nor deny using similar technology.
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The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh More

The Taxman's Web Spider Cometh

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  • I guess this is further evidence that there are two things one cannot escape - death and taxes.

    • Re: the tax man cometh (Score:5, Funny)

      by Snarfangel ( 203258 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:41PM (#17785610) Homepage
      I guess this is further evidence that there are two things one cannot escape - death and taxes.

      Yeah, but death only comes for you once.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 )
        Yeah, but death only comes for you once.

        Well can you tell him that? I don't mind the company, per se, when spends some time sitting at the foot of my bed, but I could do without the anticipatory gleam in his eye. It's very disconcerting.

        I think he's hoping that a bit of insomnia might just push me over the edge.

        KFG

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by ne0n ( 884282 )

        I guess this is further evidence that there are two things one cannot escape - death and taxes.

        Yeah, but death only comes for you once.

         
        Not if your name is Rincewind :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by balthan ( 130165 )
      Three: death, taxes, and this stupid joke.
    • Now, if only someone would invent a spider that could kill, then you won't be able to escape either on the internet...

      "killspider -9 Anonymous Coward"
    • Yeah, we send citizens as soldiers to other countries to die, but tax the hell out of them for the privilege. Niro would have been proud.

  • How's this work then? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by grassy_knoll ( 412409 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:30PM (#17785550) Homepage
    From TFA:

    The spider can also be configured and trained to look at particular economic niches -- a useful feature for compiling lists of business in industries that traditionally have high rates of non-filing. "For instance, weight control (yields) 85,000 hits, some for products ... also services," says Sweden's Hardyson.

    Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon's Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.
    So the spider scrapes a publically available site for the business or shipping address, adds that to a database and then someone at a later point checks to see if there's an income tax form from that address.

    Wouldn't that generate false positives if the billing address is, say, a post office box while the corporate tax forms are filed from the home office?
    • Require logins in order to see addresses or any other identifying info. You have to do that to purchase anything anyway, on a typical site like that.

      If the web spider doesn't have a login name, it can't see any identifying info.

      • Another idea, too (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Travoltus ( 110240 )
        If the IP address is from a known list of Government sites or any known spiders, redirect them to pages free of personal information.

        This would also be useful in keeping spiders armed with manually-created website logins from slurping down tons of personal information for private databases... oh crap, I'm giving them ideas!
        • Unfortunately, if you present different data to spiders than you do to normal surfers, you'll find yourself booted out of Google and other automated web indexes, which can be a fate worse than death for many Internet businesses.

          Giving one result to government IP addresses and another to private sector addresses would work for a time, but it would be trivial for the government to recruit some private-sector contractor to do the crawling for them, and that would be the end of that game. So if you wanted to go

      • Even Better (Score:3, Informative)

        by earthforce_1 ( 454968 )
        If you detect the spider, you could quietly redirect them to a honeypot full of bogus personal data and useless links to crap their database and make them waste time sifting through plausible but useless data. The generated "customer" names and addresses can even be real, just combine random first and last names plugged into http://findaperson.canada411.ca/ [canada411.ca] and add the returned names and addresses to your customer database. Voila!

        ( I was recently screwed by the taxman despite making rigorous efforts to adh
        • ( I was recently screwed by the taxman despite making rigorous efforts to adhere to their byzantine rules, so I have no longer have any moral qualms about helping others fight them )

          I believe that everyone should pay the taxes they owe, and underreporting raises my tax burden as well as the national debt, so I do have moral qualms about helping people evade their responsibilities. Additionally, if enough people stopped paying taxes, it would adversely affect the people who depend most on tax dollars, which

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by numbski ( 515011 ) *
        You could do that. Or you could make good use of that .htaccess, robots.txt, and if it comes right down to it, your firewall.

        Access logs will tell you who has been there. If the spider comes a knocking, block it with .htacess and robots.txt. If they decide to get sneaky and bypassthose, block it at the firewall.

    • Re:How's this work then? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:39PM (#17785898)
      Look to Europe for a "solution" to that: Every website by or for Germans that isn't strictly private is required by law to link to an imprint from every page. Non-private includes every site with a banner ad, every site with regular editorial content and of course every for-profit site. So far this has been very profitable for lawyers who send costly cease and desist letters on behalf of competing businesses to site owners who don't follow that rule. Besides, most websites already identify their owner via the domain name Whois records...
    • Wouldn't that generate false positives if the billing address is, say, a post office box while the corporate tax forms are filed from the home office?

      But unlike all other crimes, Tax Evasion is a crime where you are guilty until proven innocent. Tax authorities investigate, and the obligation is on you to prove to them that the money you make at your P.O. box is being reported at your home office.

  • I for one ... (Score:2, Funny)

    by mrvan ( 973822 )
    I for one welcome our new octopedic taxiverous overlords
  • If a man or a woman or a company pays tax payment but similar man or woman or a company doesn't pay it, then that is not fair.

    The man or woman or company that is not paying fair share of tax payment should pay them swiftly, with grevious infliction of back-penalty payment.

    • Life isn't fair (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That is the way the tax code works.
      Legally some people don't pay the taxes others do.
      A man with a family and a mortgage pays less tax than someone without-eeven if he earns much more.
      Two neighbors on either side of State line pay much different taxes because of where they live.

      Extra-legally you don't have to pay taxes on money that doesn't show up on paper/electronic records.
      • Extra-legally you don't have to pay taxes on money that doesn't show up on paper/electronic records.

        Extra-legally you do have to pay taxes on under-the-table transactions, it's just that it's harder to catch you and extract the requisite pound of flesh. The IRS expects their cut no matter what.

        Besides, "fair" is relative.
    • If a man or a woman or a company pays tax payment but similar man or woman or a company doesn't pay it, then that is not fair.

      Why do taxes need to be "fair"? They don't exist as some sort of mandatory punishment you commiserate with colleagues about, they exist to gather the funds necessary for governance and social programs. Fairness is far less a virtue than maintaining efficiency.

      Consider this: below a certain income level, it costs more to monitor, collect, and audit the taxes than the government actu
      • Would you accept a new system where you paid 10% less taxes, but your neighbors paid 30% less?

        No for two reasons:

        1) Firstly they could bid higher than be for things we are in competition for, like housing.
        2) For most people relative wealth is very important. "Noone buys a Rolls Royce because it is comfortable, they buy one to show how much better than are than everyone else"

        Sorry I cannot attribute the quote.

  • I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Perseid ( 660451 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:38PM (#17785594)
    Mr. Spider sees an eBay store named Bob's Cat Toys. How do they know who Bob's Cat Toys actually is without issuing subpoenas? The address isn't necessarily listed anywhere until you buy something.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kijori ( 897770 )
      I don't know what the situation is in other countries but in the UK, at least, any site that sells things is obliged to display their trading address (and VAT registration number) publicly.
      • I call bullshit: in the UK you don't have to be registered for VAT at all below the threshold turnover, so you can trade perfectly legally without a VAT number / registration, so you cannot be obliged to display one.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kijori ( 897770 )
          Sorry, any site selling things above the VAT threshold must display the VAT number. It also doesn't apply to auctions. (although I'm not entirely sure on eBay's position here, don't they claim not to be an auction to avoid some requirement?)
    • '' Mr. Spider sees an eBay store named Bob's Cat Toys. How do they know who Bob's Cat Toys actually is without issuing subpoenas? The address isn't necessarily listed anywhere until you buy something. ''

      They send an email to Bob's Cat Toys (eBay lets you do that). "Dear Mr. Bob's Cat Toys, this is Mr. Smith from Inland Revenue. We seem to have no records of your company. Would you please contact me within seven days so that we can fill out all the relevant paperwork and can send you your tax forms. ".

      At tha
  • I wonder what user agent this uses and what the legitimacy would be of data used by authorities if either the user agent was spoofed or if it ignored robots.txt?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by h2g2bob ( 948006 )
      From the article "Den Uyl declined to say what user-agent the Xenon software reports itself as." So that means it's "internet explorer" I guess.

      As for the legality, if you or I were to spoof the UA and ignore robots.txt, then it would be illegal. If the government spies on it's own citizens, holds people without trial and sets up secret european prisons for torture, then that's legal.
      • As for the legality, if you or I were to spoof the UA and ignore robots.txt, then it would be illegal.

        Can you cite any precedent to show that this is the case? I was under the impression that robots.txt was merely an agreement that many web-spidering operators had agreed to follow, and was without any real tested legal standing. It seems to be at most a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" that most everyone has agreed to follow, but that isn't really enforced.

  • Interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JKConsult ( 598845 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:43PM (#17785632)
    I'd be curious to see how exactly they propose to spider a gambling site. Unless you've won so much money that your name is posted on the webpage (like the winner of the Sunday Million on PokerStars), I can't really see how this is going to work. And yes, I've RTFA.

    In the abstract, I'm not against it. Tax cheats are tax cheats. Now, I don't claim my online poker winnings, but that's because they amount to such a piddlingly small sum each year that it really isn't worth my time. If I were to get audited, I'm sure I'd get busted, as the winnings deposit into my bank account, and should count as income. How they go about doing it is the key. If they just use publicly available information such as the aforementioned posting on the webpage, then fine. If you're dumb enough to win that kind of money and think you're getting away with not paying taxes, then you deserve what you get.

    • Re:Interesting. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Fezmid ( 774255 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:52PM (#17785686)
      Woah, I just saw a big spider walk by, read your post, make some marks in a notebook, and then walk away! Freaky!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by iminplaya ( 723125 )
      Now, I don't claim my online poker winnings...If you're dumb enough to win that kind of money and think you're getting away with not paying taxes, then you deserve what you get.

      Yeah, baby! Right on! Hey, buddy. The amount don't matta. Just like Christmas, it's the thought that counts. Cheating is cheating. Fascinating bit of "logic" you got there. I have a teeny, tiny problem with people who think that a "little" cheating is ok, and that anybody who cheats more than they do is a filthy crook.

      Tax cheats are

      • Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JKConsult ( 598845 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:39PM (#17785900)
        The amount don't matta.

        I knew I should have made myself more clear. Yes, I am cheating on my taxes. And yes, it's "just as bad" (I don't really think it is, and neither do you, because volume does matter, but we're both accepting this as part of the argument) as someone who sets up shady tax shelters to save billions.

        What I was saying is that I win about $100 every year playing online poker. Yes, I could go to all the trouble of trying to get some sort of documentation, add it to my income, and pay the taxes. Or, I could pocket the $30 and forget about it. I do the latter. As I said, if busted, I would freely admit to it, and would accept the punishment, as I realize that I am cheating on my taxes.

        There is a logic to my position. Part of the FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) standards include the concept of "cost-benefit" and "relevance" to reporting financials. The first may not apply here, as it basically states that if the cost of gaining the information (depreciating, say, light bulbs) outweighs the benefits of the users of the filings having it, then you don't need to worry. The second does matter. It basically states that (as opposed to something large, like property or equipment), if you're IBM and you buy a $5,000 desk for someone, they could give a flip whether you expense it or depreciate it. Because it doesn't matter. I consider my $100 winnings online versus my salary and go with the latter option, that it's so small as to be irrelevant. If the IRS disagrees, then I'm willing to pay the piper.
        • Never mind the IRS. What are you planning to do if the FBI finds out about your gambling winnings?
    • Didn't you know? In the early years, skynet was one hell of a poker shark.

    • Re:Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:37PM (#17785890) Journal
      In the abstract, I'm not against it. Tax cheats are tax cheats.

      Why? Why do people so readily accept the idea of "death and taxes"???

      If our taxes actually went to reasonable uses, I'd agree with you. Infrastructure improvement, national -de-fense, international negotiation.

      But no, instead we pay (in the US, at least) a third of our income toward fuck-all. I work so a quarter of the population who could work can sit at home and munch cheetos all day watching soaps. I work so some starving artist doesn't starve. I work so unappreciative kids can get their socialized babysitting and social indoctrination. I work so our oligarchy can squeeze their kids through low-GPA MBAs and perpetuate the lines of power. I work so we can kill arabs who inconveniently live too near "our" oil.



      I can think of few more noble crimes than "tax cheat".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tgv ( 254536 )
        You're just a total egotistic w*nker, aren't you? If you paid a little bit more, you could educate these poor people and their children in decent schools instead of forcing them to accept very badly paid jobs under conditions which I don't find fit for my dog, just so you can get your coffee cheap at WalMart, or send them to institutions that are grimmer than prisons, yet have a level of violence which the average Iraqi would consider excessive. Your way of thinking has brought your country to a fiscal and

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pla ( 258480 )
          You're just a total egotistic w*nker, aren't you?

          I have direct access to exactly one perspective on this universe. Anyone who claims otherwise wants something.



          If you paid a little bit more,

          No. You can't solve the world's problems by throwing money at them.

          That said, go take a peek at some of my posting history, and you'll see that I do support things like universal socialized medicine and state-funded higher education. My objeciton arises when I start paying for things I can't use... Yeah, I m
      • You don't pay taxes because the government does all the little things you want it to. You don't pay life insurance to get rich. You don't pay health insurance so you can have a heart attack. You dn't put money into retirement accounts because you just don't need the money now.

        You do thses things because at some point, you - or your family - will get a benefit. At some point you're going to need that stuff, and it would suck royally not to have it. If you're against abortion, do you forego health insurance

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by khallow ( 566160 )

          You don't pay taxes because the government does all the little things you want it to. You don't pay life insurance to get rich. You don't pay health insurance so you can have a heart attack. You dn't put money into retirement accounts because you just don't need the money now.

          The government pays for my health insurance only because the state of California currently is my employer (I'm a graduate student). If I were employed elsewhere, the government wouldn't pay for my insurance. Retirement accounts are

          • The government pays for my health insurance only because the state of California currently is my employer (I'm a graduate student). If I were employed elsewhere, the government wouldn't pay for my insurance.

            You miss the point. When you pay premiums to private companies, you're paying for services you don't use all the time.
            • Crap. I hadn't even begun the comment when it was submitted. The issue isn't that you pay for things you don't use--that's exactly the REASON for collective plans. By paying a nominal amount, you are contributing to a system where you have access to means of support. You might pay $5000/year for health insurance when your actual billed expenses are $1500. The rest is paying for service you don't need, and moreover for immense profits for the insurance company. But what if one day you need a $50,000 op

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by khallow ( 566160 )

                OTOH, I believe there is a genuine problem with people paying for a lot of services that are only used by a few to enrich themselves. I resent the continual implication that because we all use (in the sense of insurance, even if we never direct claim it) some services funded by government that this somehow means any service funded by government should get a pass. Frankly, I'm willing to receive less from the government in exchange for paying less to the government. I don't see this as an unreasonable reques

                • There's no problem with cutting back spending. There's a problem with abolishing services which legitimately help people simply because some people find them useless. You don't get government a la carte, and you shouldn't. People sometimes have to pay for services they don't use and don't want the government to offer, because maybe someone else feels the same about services you DO want left intact.

                  If you want to cut back military funding by 20%, I'm for that (not all at once, naturally), but I find it pu

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by khallow ( 566160 )

                    You can build a crappy pool for $5000 and spend $40,000 maintaining it over the years, or you can do it right and spend $15,000 in the beginning and only have $5000 in maintenance. The political pressures in this country strongly favor the former. But again, political problems aren't solved by throwing money at them, nor are they solved by wiping them out altogether. The "happy medium" here, sadly, is a set of expensive and toothless programs. It's political stagflation, because half of us want our own mo

    • Tax cheats are tax cheats. Now, I don't claim my online poker winnings, but that's because they amount to such a piddlingly small sum each year that it really isn't worth my time.

      Is that total winnings or winnings over expences?

      Those who gamble don't do the math.

      If they did the math, they wouldn't gamble.

  • get mining (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:47PM (#17785646)

    The software in question is called DataDetective (win32)
    http://www.sentient.nl/ [sentient.nl]

    parent company
    http://www.smr.nl/ [www.smr.nl]

  • From TFA: "...suspected internet tax cheats..."
    The Internet is now taxed by the government? Huh?

  • details are sketchy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @04:51PM (#17785680)
    After reading the article I'm still not sure exactly how it works. How do they know who is behind the particular auction ID? Do they have access to the auction houses' databases? It appears to only use whatever information is online.

    Does it also use whois information for domains? Not sure what htey are doing to correlate information. Need more details!

    --M

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      After reading the article I'm still not sure exactly how it works.

      They've refitted the cat detector vans. Don't purr over your online earnings.

      KFG

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by WrongSizeGlass ( 838941 )

      Need more details!
      They're crawling your post right now and will notify you of the details. ;-)
    • Don't see myself how it would work for domains, unless they contact the registrar as ask for the information. As to listing sites like Craigslist, I can't see how the spider will gather anything. As to auction sites, that's easier, eBay already coughs up that information to Tax Authorities with ease.
  • Could this type of system also be used to compile a data base of people who make purchases from online stores? Could this then be used to send a bill to an individual for back taxes owed for online purchases? TFA contains few details as to how any of these government agencies has profited from this system. If all of my online purchases could be added up and then taxed then I could be in for a disturbingly large tax due bill from my state, or even from other states in the US.

    Anyone know if this system has be
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Actually, they started a few years ago. According to the 'taskforce' they aren't targetting single resellers on e-bay. They are targetting (pseudo) companies that sell large amounts of stuff and thus also generating lots of income through these sites. Usually such sites also want to appear legit to their customers and probably are (except for their taxable income) also legit and thus have their contact information, website and address with the auction or at least a link to it.

    I have however doubts as to how
    • 1. Where is the sale closed? Doesn't matter. You have to pay tax on your profit, and VAT on the sales.
      2. Where is the business when they don't file paperwork? If they catch you, that is where the business is unless you can proof that it is elsewhere. Which you can't because you didn't file any paperwork.
      3. Is it legal collecting publicly available data? Of course.
      4. Is it legal for the government to tax income? Want to bet?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )
        1. Not necessarily. If I order stuff from a website (eg. Apple), I usually don't pay VAT (here in the US) because it's interstate sales while going to the local Apple store does get me 8% added to the sales price for tax.
        2. You might have a point, although proving jurisdiction is going to be difficult
        3. The government can't just collect data, submit it to a court and say you did "Bad Things (tm)". That's why we have a constitution, search warrants, the burden of proof and so. Of course some people in our go
    • 4) Dude, have you read the 16th amendment?

      16th Amendment
        The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States and without regard to any census or enumeration.
  • This is for people who are making a sizeable chunk of income from selling services. This is no different from a tax collector walking into some sort of shady store in a back alley which doesn't file taxes and auditing it. When you post something online on a site like eBay, you would expect everyone to see it, after all, wouldn't you?
  • But... but... Nooooooooooooooooo!!!!

    If the Internet wasn't income and sales tax free, it's just the same garage-sale and China*Mart quality junk for the same price as the big blue room by the time you add the 15$ shipping on a $2 item...

    Crap, now I have to go outside.

  • In the UK (Score:4, Informative)

    by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Saturday January 27, 2007 @05:43PM (#17785922) Journal
    it is worth noting that (in the UK) the tax men don't need to be able to prove anything has actually been done wrong in order to follow up with an investigation - at which point you have to prove that you are innocent rather than them having to prove guilt. They can ask for your tax returns and bank info etc. for the last 10 years, if you don't have it its because you're committing tax fraud... I guess this might just be able to point them in the right direction rather than doing all the work, so even with just a name it might be enough...

    I just hope I don't have the same name as someone whose on the make

  • Standards ? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by billcopc ( 196330 )
    Now then, shall they honor robots.txt ?

    User-agent: TaxSpider
    Disallow: /

    But really all this means is you can file a tiny tax report for your auction/poker/porn business and get away with it, as long as you file something. How will this spider tell them whether I made 20'000 or half a million from online business ? It won't. If their method of finding tax evaders depends on published HTML, I think they're screwed from the get-go. What if the address isn't in text form, but rendered to an image, overlaid o
    • User-agent: TaxSpider
      Disallow: /

      Clearly an attempt to hide tax fraud.

      Better to allow known good User-Agents first such as; Google's spider, Yahoo, MSN, a few compatible browsers and then use;
      User-agent: all
      Disallow: /

      This looks like permitting known compatible spiders and browsers and trying to keep e-mail harvesters out. Now you have a plausable excuse other than tax fraud.

  • And how about items that are used? How do they differentiate?

    The taxes have already been paid, so in this case wouldn't the online auction fall in the same category as garage-sales and buy-and-sell ads?

    Not that the government doesn't already happily double-dip elsewhere (houses, vehicles, etc)...
  • This sounds like it is, or would be, a step backward for the IRS. Computer programs are not as singleminded or unyielding as IRS agents.
  • Now I can claim the tax offset from my online porn subscriptions.

    Profit!

  • What the article doesn't tell you... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GuyFawkes ( 729054 ) on Sunday January 28, 2007 @08:38AM (#17789346) Homepage Journal
    Articles like this are a lot like the television licence (http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/) or road fund licence (http://www.dvla.gov.uk/) FUD, (incidentally if you google "road fund licence" the increasingly irrelevant google search will give ebay as an option...) which goes along the lines of local ad campaigns saying "we know there are 14 houses in Letsby Avenue with no TV licence" cos their database says so, I don't have a TV, but the presumption is that everyone does have a TV, and anyone who doesn't is a liar and a licence fee dodger.

    In the Uk as far back as 1980, so before everything except mainframes in any meaningful sense, Banks were obliged to notify the tax man of any ammounts you had if balances or individual transfers were over 300 pounds.

    While these articles are FUD "we know what you are doing on e-bay, so pay up before we nail you", which will collect some people along the way, the reality is the system as advertised cannot work, my ebay handle is not my name, my ebay address is my mothers house (when I signed up for ebay I was moving, just not sure where, and have never bothered updating) and most of my transactions have been in cash, and I have bought and sold expensive capital items like vehicles on ebay.

    Far Far Far easier to simply crawl ebay for completed sales, total amounts, large capital items, and then match these amounts and dates to bank accounts, aha, ebay user "taxfreetrader" is Joe Bloggs.

    Of course a huge number of transactions are paid via paypal, so there is an electronic record with an even better method of searching and matching.

    People who regularly deposit 1000 bucks and over for single items may get busted, people who regularly transfer 1000 bucks and over from paypal may get busted, people who believe this crap will turn themselves in, everyone else who is smart and deals in cash or equivalents such as Postal Orders will not get busted, except perhaps second hand from the person you sold to or bought from getting busted, and them grassing you up.

    The other things they are looking for that this can help to detect is VAT (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/T axes/BeginnersGuideToTax/) carousel fraud (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_tr ends/ETAug03Ruffles.pdf)

    The average guy on the street like me with 150 feedback spread over 3 years has fuck all to worry about.
  • You shall have all the government you deserve.

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