Hi Jothar: Absolutley.
In Jersey there are the State Police Internet Crimes Bureau as well as the FBI’s. I had to contact them once because in a chat room someone was claiming to be kidnapped. Some of the chatters believed it, some did not. Some made out and out jokes about it.
I thought it was better to be safe than sorry, so I called the State Police who transfered me to the Newark office of the FBI. Anyway, while on the phone with them, the agent went to the site and it was amazing what they could see and find out. They saw the person was pranking (thank heaven) because they were not at all at the location where they said they were behind held against their will,
among other things which I dont remember now.
Curiously, the agent said they would not do anything for the prank of saying they were kidnapped. He said it was more a matter of juvenality than criminality.
Also, you may be interested in knowing, I came across a hacker once who was on the FBI list for computer crimes, or something like that. At that time his name was Atomic Bomb. I doubted him, and he told me to look it up. I did look it up and his name was on there at the FBI website.
When I told him I still doubted him, he suddenly took control of what I was typing to him by typing as though he were me; just like if you were typing a post here and all of a sudden the sentences being written were not from you, and you just sat there and watched each letter like a ghost was typing or something within your own account.
The cyber world has a lot of gaping loopholes for people to do stuff. It is beyond me how they can do that, and sadly, law enforcement is so busy with it they have to let some of the situations go unresponded.
I had come to realize that the computer world is a large universe with many LE agencies who are already working on the problems, along with security measures employed by individual sites.
I definitely agree if on a grass-roots level, so to speak, someone suspects something is going on, by all means try to head the problem off at the pass and warn people.