If you are American and have been scammed by these guys, you should:
1.) If the funds have not been picked up yet, call Western Union immediately. They will put a stop on it and return your money.
2.) File a mail fraud complaint with the USPS - wire fraud is within their jurisdiction:
http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors...dComplaint.htm - It generally takes the postal service about 6 weeks to get back to you in my experience.
3.) File a police report in your local juridiction - This is a necessary step. Once you have done this, it is up to your local police to follow up with authorities in other locations as needed. Whatever you do, do not label this as a computer crime. Tell them you want to file a wire fraud complaint or depending on the amount of money, it may be a larceny complaint. BTW, you can use this police report as a tax deduction when you file your Federal income tax returns even if your local police turn out to be ineffective.
Whatever you do, don't expect law enforcement to respond quickly or to really want to pursue your cause. LE generally takes the path of least resistance. They tend to make quick arrests in cases that don't require much work on their behalf and the rest hit the "dead letter" file. Usually, LE regardless of office do not want to handle computer crimes and do not have staff for computer crimes. You will often get the excuse that they don't have the resources to investigate your crime, especially if the $ amount is less than $1k and it has anything to do with a computer. I've had trouble in the past getting even the Boston police to go after an ebay seller who sold me $1500 in counterfeit sandisk product even though he was in indiana and he was paid by corporate check. Just because email was involved, I must have gotten the "computer crime resources" excuse about 20 times and all they needed to do was file charges and start arrest/extradition proceedings. Make sure you constantly keep calling and annoy the crap out of them. Always make sure the detective you talk to always gives you another contact to call if he says he can't do anything about it or it's the wrong department. It's more work chasing the cops to get them to do their job than if I got on a plane and broke the guy's legs myself. I even gave them a copy of the guy's tax assessment for his home and a copy of his resume, and the boston police still used the computer crime excuse.
As for the FTC - they don't do anything. Don't expect a damn thing from these guys. They care more about fining people who spam fax machines with vacation and mortgage offers than helping you with a foireign scam purchase.
As for the FBI - They won't get involved unless it's over $25k with a minimum of $10k per incident and if you do end up getting ripped off, you will find the first person they will investigate is always you. I had a friend who ran an internet business and someone in SE Asia cloned his credit card processing system using his merchant account info. They issued a $25k "refund" to a Turkish visa - effectively stealing $25k from his bank account. You know what happened when a complaint was filed with the FBI? For 2 weeks, he was under surveillance at his home and was questioned every 2 months for over a year. At no point was his money returned. The credit card processing company made him eat it in the end.
The only LE agency I have ever seen a good response from was the Secret Service. I knew a guy who had a scan of a $10 bill on his pc at my old college and he accidentally shared the directory on his computer on the campus network. A 'good samaritan' called the secret service and complained that he had high resolution scans of a $10 bill on his pc, and within 2 days 3 secret service agents showed up, ransacked his room, took his computer equipment, grilled him for 8 hours, and finally stuck him with 3 felonies.
If this guy had a scan of a $10 bill on his webserver, they would be on his ass in days. Considering how many different ISP's he uses and how poorly configured some of them have been, it's most likely just a matter of time before someone might find some high resolution scans of US currency on one of his webservers...Now, wouldn't that be interesting.
