"If the Net were a neighborhood, you wouldn't want to walk through it without packing heat." So said a friend of mine the other day, and he may be right.
As the public suspects, the con artists are thriving, and for every 10 who are busted, a million run wild, and very few do jail time, or are even obliged to admit their wrongdoing. (When a fine, often quite small compared to the profit, is paid, there's frequently no requirement of an admission of guilt.)
Chris and I are often asked how this happens. Well, the Net, albeit a toddler, is a toddler from the planet Krypton, and it long ago outgrew the resources of your average state or federal watchdog. Second, the scammers take their heavy gains and lawyer up strong. Finally, for better or worse, most countries have boundaries, but the Net has few, and consider what that means...
Before the Net, your average American's familiarity with con artists was pretty limited. A tourist visiting New York City might get taken in a three-card-monte game, or you might pay too much for a used car (people seeking work from home would have been familiar with the old envelope-stuffing scam). But by and large we were blissfully unfamiliar with the sly thievery common in some countries, and the opportunities for our home-grown rogues were limited by geography and the inconvenience and expense of travel.
Now, when we log on, we're fair game for every criminal and sociopath with a modem -- around the world, not just from the back of a patent-medicine wagon -- and many of these predators descend from generations of grifters, hustlers, cutpurses and horse thieves.
Moreover, top techies in poorer countries are often opting for dirty salaries over clean unemployment (malware, anyone?), while the top techies in the US -- who could track their "evil twins" so effectively -- opt for Silicon Valley or Wall Street over the consumer-protection agencies, which can pay but a fraction of the better private-sector rates. (No stock options, either -- and bureaucracy the techies dislike.)
The politicians have proposed various international measures to crack down on the crims, and laws already on the books offer lots of enforcement options. But with a handful of sheriffs and deputies (most armed only with derringers or pop-guns) in a megalopolis of 1.8 billion (Internet users), with some 75% of the world's population not even online yet.... Well, the West is going to be Wild for a few years to come, and Caveat Surfer is the phrase to remember.
Posted by: |