Nigel Morris-Cotterill, Head, the Anti-Money Laundering Network, a United Kingdom (UK) based money laundering monitoring group, has said that the lack of effective control over free and anonymous e-mail and internet domain names facilitates crime, terrorism and costs businesses millions as well as being a matter of national  and civil security.

He stated this in a press statement issued on the state of insecurity in Nigeria and the role money laundering is playing and made available to news-hounds in Lagos. He said the focus of government has so far been on the use of services such as free and anonymous e-mail and fraudulent web sites but that the burden of trying to police the activities of criminals and preventing their actions has fallen on businesses in most terrorist ravaged countries including Nigeria.

That burden, he argues, should fall on free and anonymous e-mail service providers and on those who sell domains. Morris-Cotterill said the system is in need of a serious overhaul. “Right now, businesses are suffering ever-increasing costs not only from spam which has had all the attention from governments but also from fraudsters opening accounts at websites and using them for criminal purposes.

It is not right that those costs should fall on millions of, often small, businesses. Currently, the only option is for website owners to form their own view as to fraudulent domains, using internet based tools and search engines to identify fraudulent domains and/or users.

That is very time consuming. “The United Nations is considering control of various aspects of the internet but it is missing the critical point: the current system not only allows, it actively facilitates anonymous and fraudulent use”.

He argues that the burden should fall on those who operate free e-mail services to verify ownership and to monitor accounts, pointing out that technology already in use in banks and other financial institutions to monitor suspicious transactions to detect fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing can be applied with little modification.

“Why try to contain a problem when it can be shut down at source? It’s like gas – once the tap is open, it goes everywhere and it can never be pushed back into the pipe. So let’s turn the tap tight and prevent the gas escaping in the first place,” he says.

That, he accepts, will mean the end of totally free e-mail accounts and an increase in the price of domain names. That is a price worth paying he says, for a reduction in the costs and burden facing businesses, the risks they face as publishers of comments left by fraudsters and the costs to the general economy, law enforcement and matters of national and civil security.