The Industry Standard has an interesting story on "cramming," a despicable practice whereby unscrupulous web hosting services put up a shoddy web site without the company's knowledge and secretly bills them. The charge is buried deep in the phone bill.

CNN has an interesting story about people getting ripped off from a Cerritos, California company called Crossline which purported sold cheap PCs. People were asked to pay with cash to ensure quicker delivery. Of course, the cash and the company disappeared.

APBnews.com has a couple of interesting fraud stories: Cops Stuff Suspect in Online Beanie Swindle describes how police nabbed a man suspected of defrauding Beanie Baby collectors out of $200,000; and Software Pirates Dominate Online Auctions reveals that up to 60% of online software auctions may be bootleg.

This story is a part of PCWorld's series on scams describes frauds perpetrated at online auctions. I personally use EBay and haven't encountered fraud yet, but I am leary of first-time sellers or people with negative feedback.

Interesting story at CNN about the Pairgain stock touting incident at Yahoo and Silicon Investor and other online scams.

PCWorld also has an interesting story about pump and dump stock scams such as the case against futuresuperstocks.com.

CNN reports that Yahoo is suing a company for allegedly forging a Yahoo return address in spam. Spammers are getting more sophisticated now that most mail servers deny "relaying" privileges to unauthorized hosts which was the old way to spam. This new method still damages the brand and reputation of the forged company's name.

IDG has an interesting story on how frauds are perpetrated against online merchants and how authorities are reluctant to prosecute.