.......now the US needs to catch the thousands of other people using the www for crime purposes. For this I wish the US authorities the best of luck, in catching, prooving and convicting them.

Come on people is time to train people into what looks like and what isn't a proper site. Did none of the people ripped off by this scammer, ring AOL to check. If the first person who read the email had rung up and checked, AOL could have sorted the issue out sooner.

The other way is not have credit cards, and stay off the internet.

China may have the right idea. They have the death penalty for almost everything. I've heard that jaywalking gets you 50 years and failure to help old ladies across the street is worth 25.

Of course, as long as the spamers/phisers aren't harming other Chinese, it may not be a crime. After all, they're bringing money into the economy.

Dillon in Texas. At least we try to keep up.

I don't know if you've ever tried calling AOL (or any other company that size...) but I imagine it'd take quite a bit of effort to get to someone that knew enough not to tell you to click on the link. First level tech / customer support might just not listen to you and tell you to do whatever the email says to get you off the phone. Lets hope that sort of people have, by now, been breifed on the importance of this sort of thing.

That said, they still probably don't care, since its not their company, and advice like that would be quite difficult to track back to them...

I work for a large internet company, Nexox, not AOL but someone of that ilk and I can assure you that everyone within the company and at the call centres is well aware of issues with phishing and spam. I know large companies get a bad wrap (and it's kind of deserved in AOL's case), but we are not all staffed by morons...