How Microsoft works with the Police

Microsoft work very closely with law enforcement agencies all over the world when crimes are being investigated that involve communications services available through MSN.

Our legal team have developed a formal procedure through which all legal inquiries must be submitted. It runs as follows:

• A member of the public contacts their local Police station with an incident related to MSN
  
• The local Police will either resolve the case or will contact their own specialist Internet Single Point of Contact - SPOC for short
  
• The Police SPOC has been specifically trained to obtain and analyse Internet data
  
• It is the Police SPOC that will liaise with Microsoft, not the officer in your local Police station
  
• The SPOC is an internal resource for the police and may not be contacted by members of the public

More about SPOCs

• There are forty three regional police constabularies in the UK - your local police station will form part of one of these constabularies
  
• Within each constabulary, there is a person (or sometimes more than one person), called an  Internet Single Point of Contact
  
• When you report a crime to your local police station, the officer that you speak to may not know a lot about Internet crime or how online communications services, such as e-mail and chat rooms, operate
  
• If this is the case, they will need to speak with the Internet SPOC in their constabulary to better understand the issues relevant to your particular case