Use and Abuse of the Internet in Fraud and Money Laundering

The Internet provides an ideal opportunity for defrauding those who are less technologically advanced or who are enthralled by the technology. Yet the frauds and other financial crime which are perpetrated on the Internet are, in principle, no different from those which have been committed over time. The advantages to the criminal of the Internet as against most other media are that there is an opportunity to make vast numbers of cold calls at a cost which borders on the free, the opportunity to create credibility by the use of legitimate imagery from reputable sources and to secure the proceeds of the crime not only anonymously but also in jurisdictions where the pursuit of the offender is difficult. There is also the fact that the prospective victims have been conditioned to believe that which appears on a computer screen: the suspension of incredulity and caution is deeply engendered. For that most pure of financial crimes, money laundering, there is the advantage of ease of communication, the simplicity of setting up schemes, with ready access to otherwise remote geographical and legislative locations. Yet there is another issue which does raise serious concerns, but which is not generally regarded as an offence: the provision of information and advice where there is an element of transfer pricing, with the consequent avoidance of taxes. The challenge is to bring about a system of regulation which enables free exchange of information whilst limiting the opportunity to trick people who are already conditioned to believe what they see on a computer monitor. The Internet does not create new frauds nor new money laundering schemes. It is merely a facilitator that has a high level of credibility. And it creates opportunity for the export at low prices of high value added services to the detriment of local economies, for the first time making onshore facilities fully available via offshore centres, with the consequence that it will become increasingly difficult tell the good from the bad.     

Reviews

Nigel Swain, Hungary—The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism. London and New York: Verso, 1992, vii + 264 pp., £13.95 p/b.

Ágnes Horváth & Árpád Szakolczai, The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, xviii + 254 pp., £40.00.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xiii + 284 pp., £40.00 h/b, £13.95 p/b.

Gerald Segal‐ et al., Openness and Foreign Policy Reform in Communist Slates. London and New York: Routledge for The Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1992, x + 248 pp., £40.00.

Joan Barth Urban, ed., Moscow and the Global Left in the Gorbachev Era. New York: Cornell University Press, 1992, xii + 204 pp., $32.95 h/b, $14.25 p/b.

Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De‐Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xv+ 318 pp.

Stefan Hedlund, Private Agriculture in the Soviet Union, London: Routledge, 1990, xiv + 208, pp. £30.00.

Bruno Dallago. The Irregular Economy, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1991, xxi + 202 pp., £29.50

Marie Lavigne, L'Europe de l'est: du plan au marché. Paris: Editions Libris, 1992, 191 pp., 89 francs.

Paul Calloway, Soviet and Western Psychiatry—a Comparative Study. Keighley, The Moor Press, 1992, xv + 266 pp., £22.95 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

David Wedgwood Benn, From Glasnost to Freedom of Speech. London: Pinter Publishers, 1992, vi + 106 pp., £22.50 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Gail W. Lapidus & Victor Zaslavsky, eds, From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, vii + 127 pp., £25.00 h/b, £9.95 p/b.

Robert F. Miller, ed., The Development of Civil Society in Communist Systems. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982, iv+ 188 pp., £10.95.

Geoffrey A. Hosking, ed., Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine. London: Macmillan/School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1991, xv + 357 pp., £45.00.

Richard Taylor & Ian Christie, eds, Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1991, xvii + 256 pp., £40.00.

Linda Edmundson, ed.. Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, ix + 233 pp., 35.00 h/b.

Chris Corrin, ed., Superwomen and the Double Burden. Women's Experience of Change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Scarlet Press, 1992, 297 pp., no price.

Mary. Buckley, ed., Perestroika and Soviet Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xiii+ 183 pp., £30.00 h/b, £10.95 p/b.

Rajendra K. Jain, Germany, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1949–1991. London: Sangam Books Limited, 1993, xv + 368 pp., £25.95.

Philip J. Bryson & Manfred Melzer, The End of the East German Economy: From Honecker to Reunification. London: Macmillan, 1991, xiii+ 148 pp. £40.00.

Liliana Saiu. The Great Powers and Rumania 1944–1946. A Study of the Early Cold War Era. East European Monographs, Boulder, CO: 1992, xiii + 290 pp., $42.00.     

Excursions into political economy of health

S.M. Hillier and J. A. Jewell, Health Care and Traditional Medicine in China 1800–1982, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Pp.xix + 452; £25.00.

D. Banerji, Poverty, Class and Health Culture in India (Vol.1), New Delhi: Prachi Prakashan, 1982. Pp.x + 309; Rs.100.

W.A. Zaman, Public Participation in Development and Health Programs: Lessons from Rural Bangladesh, London and New York: University Press of America, 1984. Pp.xix + 291; £15.15. (paperback).

J.K. van Ginneken and A.S. Muller (eds.), Maternal and Child Health in Rural Kenya: An Epidemiological Study, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1984. Pp.viii + 373; £15.95.

The expression ‘political economy of health’ has quite different implications to scholars working within differing paradigms. The range of interpretations is apparent from an overview of work in this field in recent years. Two studies of singular importance for the student of health politics and health care in Asia are singled out for detailed review: one on China, the other on India. The reviewer also raises the question as to how far health education has been seen in the radical tradition as contributory towards the process of politicisation in peasant societies: here the literature is more scattered and a deeper analysis would be well repaid.     

The war‐making state and privatisation

States, created with the central purpose of defending national independence, resist the process of macro‐economic reform since it appears to limit their power to pursue this aim. The states of the former Centrally Planned Economies were marked out by their extreme subordination to the military drive, so the resistance to reshaping the ‘war‐making state’ into a ‘market‐facilitating state’ is considerable. The transition tends to be halted where the old structures of central control are ended without markets supplying alternative imperatives — a ‘rent‐seeking state’ is created. These themes are examined in relationship to privatisation of state owned enterprises in four countries: Russia, China, Vietnam and the Ukraine.     

Obituaries: Lady Delia Pilcher

The New York-born journalist and travel writer Francis Nichols (1879-1904) is best known for his travels through early 20^th-century China. However, his attempt in 1903-4 to travel through Tibet to Lhasa ahead of the Younghusband Mission, and thus to become the first westerner to reach the city, has been forgotten, partly on account of his death in the field and the loss of his diary. From new research in recently-catalogued documents and letters in the archives of the American Geographical Society (AGS), the author has compiled an account of Nichols’ mission to Lhasa, including the support he received from US backers, including the AGS, his travels in China, Tibet and India, and his relations with Younghusband and the British. Although Nichols was unable to reach Lhasa, the author observes that he should be credited as the first American to travel from India into the Chumbi valley in southern Tibet and across the Tibetan plateau from Phari to the town of Gyantse, 120 miles south-west of Lhasa.