WASHINGTON, Feb. 18  Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is a victim of his own success. McCains campaign touts its more than $2 million garnered through online campaign contributions in the wake of his New Hampshire primary win as a sign that his candidacy is gaining traction among Netizens. Now, an anonymous con artist, apparently intent on tapping into that success, has set up a phony Web site to siphon off campaign contributions from unwitting McCain supporters, MSNBC has learned.

THE OFFENDING Web site is a direct copy of the official McCain 2000 for President online contribution page. On both sites, people can contribute using a credit card. On the official McCain site, those contributions are handled by an IBM e-commerce back end. On the scam Web site, the donations are handled by a different credit card vendor and funneled to an account of MediaKing International. The scam, known as page jacking by the Federal Trade Commission, takes the code of a real page and hijacks it. The copycat page then lives on a server operated by the scam artist. The FTC has already prosecuted one huge page jacking scam in which unknowing Web surfers were redirected to porn sites, thus robbing the real sites of revenue and valuable eyeballs used to increase advertising rates. The scam involving McCains campaign, however, seems to raise the page-jacking scheme to a new level. In the previous FTC case, no money was directly taken from consumers; in the McCain scam, consumers, thinking they are providing a tax-deductible campaign contribution to McCain, are simply filling a con artists pocket.

A Federal Election Commission official said the scheme would fall under federal election campaign laws only if the unidentified MediaKing perpetrators were in some way affiliated with another campaign or if it were found out that the scam was being run by a member of McCains own campaign to siphon off money for personal use. If the con artist in the McCain case isnt related to another campaign, then its likely that the Justice Department could prosecute under wire fraud laws that that DoJ has used in other Web-oriented cases in which money was collected for fraudulent purposes. MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ON THE HUNT The scam site is being hyped online in various political newsgroups as a legitimate campaign contribution solicitation via e-mail that reads in part: "Dear U.S. Cyber Citizens (Netizen), Make the difference now! Support Senator McCain, the premier underdog of the current political scene, who truly intends to make a difference. Make YOUR difference today by visiting http://63.238.64.10/mccain2000.htm to donate what you can. The e-mail touts McCains Internet stances and makes a pitch that he will be the best person to first candidate in years to actually make us feel empowered, that we can make a difference. Though the two Web sites seem identical, the tipoff to the scam is the second paragraph of the contributions page. The phony site notes that the donations are 'sponsored by' MediaKing International, which as no affiliation with the McCain campaign.

A call to the McCain campaign for comment was not returned; however, MSNBC has learned that the McCain campaign has learned of the site and is doing its own investigation. The official campaign contribution site is being run by Campaignsolutions.com, which is operated by Hockaday-Donatelli, a Virginia-based campaign firm. Becky Donatelli, of Hockaday-Donatelli, told MSNBC that she was alerted to the scam by the McCain campaign on Friday. I know theyre looking into it, Donatelli said. This isnt the first time Donatelli has run up against a page-jacking incident. An earlier campaign the group ran, the Hillary No Web site, also was hijacked. Those people werent trying to make money, Donatelli said. The Hillary No page-jackers were told to take the site down because they were violating the companys copyright, Donatelli said. In the McCain scam, Donatelli said she wasnt sure if the phony site was impacting the campaign, but that I would also have a cause of action because they are taking my system, Donatelli said. These guys need to die. The credit card authorization company handling the transactions on the McCain scam site indicates that, to date, more than 1,300 people have made donations; though there is no indication of how much money has actually been donated through the scam site. ELUSIVE SCAMSTER There is little information to be found on MediaKing International. The Internet domain name serving up the scam site is registered to mediakingx.com which was created on Feb. 5 and registered with Nameit.net, a newly accredited Internet domain-name registrar.

Beau Garcia of Nameit.net told MSNBC that the company doesnt keep billing contact information, as some domain-name registration sites do. The company does keep administrative contact information; however, that information appears to have been faked. Mediakingx.com lists two names as contacts, an address in North Hollywood, Calif., and a phone number. Neither of the names are listed in Southern California phone books and the number given turns out to be the technical support line for an unaffiliated company. The success of fund-raising efforts on the Net during this presidential election cycle has given indications that political campaigns have begun to tap into what has, to date, been thought to be a generally apathetic attitude toward organized politics, said Mike Cornfield, director of the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University.

Cornfield is now studying people that are contributing online in an effort to see if a sea change is happening among online users, a move that could dramatically shape the political landscape in coming years. When advised of the McCain site scam, Cornfield said: It speaks to the biggest single concern that weve seen in surveying online users. The No. 1 thing they wanted to see was a clear directory so they could tell the difference between official and non-official Web sites.

Cornfield said that without some kind of official campaign directory, where people could go and know they were visiting authorized sites, and not some parody, or worse, as in the case of the McCain scam, online users would continue to be confused. And this (scam) would be the biggest alarm bell yet about why we need a standardized directory that needs to be publicized so people can know what the real addresses for a campaign are, Cornfield said. There are many areas in which campaign finance law is murky with respect to the Internet, but this just seems to be cut-and-dried fraud, he said.

MSNBC reporter Bob Sullivan contributed to this report.

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), February 18, 2000

Answers

Which only goes to prove: You CAN con a con!!

-- Porky (porky@in.cellblockD), February 18, 2000.

Speaking of which, whats M. Hyatt up to these days?

-- Ra (tion@l.1), February 18, 2000.