| Scam Buster |
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February 10, 2003 The Australian Securities and Investments Commission will never sleep again. No matter what the time of day, it will be trawling the internet looking for scams and rip-off merchants. Last Monday, ASIC announced a $1 million joint project to develop an automatic internet document classification system called Scamseek. "The internet represents enormous opportunities for scams and rip-off artists," says ASIC's director of electronic enforcement Keith Inman. "The system we are developing ... will be the eye that never sleeps, constantly seeking out sites that we can take action against." The University of Sydney's Professor Jon Patrick, who is helping lead the project, says website scams tend to use certain words in certain ways. "We're using new theories of textual meanings to unravel the deep linguistic features that will enable us to detect scam proposals no matter what surface form of language they use," he says. Other countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and the Netherlands, are said to be interested in the project. |