Internet: Web 2.0 turns into Fraud 1.0 with better tech.

Mrs A is 50 years old, divorced, mother of three adult children who she supported single handedly through school and some further education. She has worked as a domestic maid, often for two or three families at the same time and taking additional part-time jobs if she can - away from her family for more than 25 years, returning once every one or two years. Despite her hard life she remains an attractive woman with a ready smile.And her life improved when, as they reached their early 20s, the children joined her getting jobs in F&B near where she lives and, eventually, them all being able to get a house together. Her sacrifices were all worth it, she felt. From smiling she went to actually being happy. And now, having deprived herself of a long-term relationship for so long, she felt able to at least consider offers if they came along. And, soon they did. One after another.

When an attractive man contacted her via Friendster, she was happy to chat to him. She gave him her Yahoo.com chat identity and they continued to talk-online and he seemed to want nothing except to talk. And eventually, she gave him her mobile phone number. She was even happier when he told her that he felt sorry for her and that he had some redundant computer equipment that he would send to her so that she could replace the old PC and so that her children could use more up to date equipment.

But he was not the man he claimed to be. He said that the package had been delivered to Customs in the country where she works and that he was very sorry but he had been contacted to say that a customs fee needed to be paid. Having sent her a lot of expensive equipment, he said, he had not thought that any fee would be payable and he didn't think it fair if he had to spend money beyond the shipping charges. Would she, he asked, mind paying the customs fee? And he sent her documents showing that the goods had been shipped from an address in the UK, naming the shipping agent in her town and other things.

There was just one thing that saved her: she had no money right then and she told him so. He became agitated and firm and she became worried. She looked more closely at the documents and realised that there were differences in the font used at various places. She told him, once more, that she could not pay and that so far as she was concerned a gift is a gift and she should not have to pay for it. If he wanted to give it, then he should send the customs fee to his agent or tell the agent to abandon the package.

One more call, in a threatening tone, was all it took for her to change her phone number and - because she had given her address for shipping - move out of the home she had lived in for a decade. But, because her internet connection was her lifeline to her family back home, she didn't change her online contact information.

A year later, an "Englishman" with a nice voice used video chat to contact her and they built up a friendship bordering on virtual dating. After several months, he announced that he was coming to her country for work. He arranged a hotel and for them to meet and - if they wished - spend the weekend together. She was excited: this was no instant flash in the pan, no one-night-stand: they had built up a relationship over a period of almost a year. He gave her his itinerary which included landing at a provincial airport and going to meetings before coming to his customer's head office near her home. He called her using a local mobile phone to confirm the arrangements to meet but, to her, something didn't feel right. She told him she would meet him at the airport, not at the hotel. That, she said, meant easier travel from her work to meet him and then they could travel to the hotel together. Of course, it also meant she met him in a public place with a great deal of security.

The day before they were due to meet, he called her. He had a problem. Immigration had decided that he was working and therefore needed a different class of visa. Because he was already in the country, they would not let him leave and re-enter to get the new pass. He would need to convert his existing visa and that, he said, would cost the equivalent of USD500. As it was the weekend at his office, he could not get money transferred quickly. Could she send the money - urgently - to a local bank account of one of his contacts so that they could take it out from an ATM and pay the fee. Without it, he said, he would not be able to travel from the provincial airport to meet her.

Another change of phone number : he, too, had become forceful when she told him that she works three jobs to earn USD500 per month and that it is quite beyond her to accumulate much less send to someone she hardly knows so much money.

Mrs A is not alone: a report in newspapers in Malaysia today is the latest in a string of such reports in which mostly middle-aged women - some with access to considerable sums of money - have been duped. In the latest report, an un-named woman handed over the equivalent of USD250,000 in a series of transactions to a con man whose story was in some ways similar to that of Mrs A's second "boyfriend." Pretending to be British, he needed, he said, money to secure a contract with a major company and needed to pay fees and stamp duty. She is by no means the first to be taken in by such a "business" proposition which is often supported by well produced fake documents. The payment of taxes and fees is a common thread: it is rare that the con-men suggest that the money they need might be for bribes - that would raise questions in the minds of the generally intelligent but lonely women they target.

But in this case, the Malaysian authorities were able to swoop: the woman belatedly worked out what was happening and went to the police. Six people have been arrested including two locals, two Bangladeshis and two Nigerians. Some MYR15,000 in cash was seized - but so were a laptop through which the gang maintained contact with victims via Facebook, seven mobile phones each with local cards - and 18 ATM cards. But, so far, of the woman's missing MYR1.1 million there is no sign.

The police say that the woman had revealed personal details on her Facebook "wall" and advised users of the popular social networking site to be cautious in the information they reveal.

It's not just Friendster and Facebook and their ilk that are being targeted by criminals or spammers. Recently YouTube.Com has also become a medium of choice. It's a scatter-gun approach, not carefully targeted and executed over a period of months for, sometimes, a tiny sum of money. In the case of YouTube, the scam involves posting a video of a popular subject but for the first few seconds showing an advertisement saying "to see the full video, click on the link below." In the Comments section, there is a link to a short-url service which, for the purposes of this scam, is designed to hide the actual destination that the victim will be taken to. The destination is, often, a second diversion placed on a hacked website and which then forwards the victim to the ultimate destination.

At that ultimate destination, the scammers post a "survey" form, or some other way of gathering personal information. But such forms have, on some occasions, been used to delay visitors while - in the background - their PC is infected in a drive-by download of malware. That malware may be used for a wide variety of purposes from key-logging and transmitting passwords to e.g. bank accounts to the installation of botnet software which effectively hands over control of part of the computer to remote servers - and then uses it to mount a distributed e-mail campaign which is designed to defeat efforts to control it by identifying IP addresses of the sender.

As Morris-Cotterill explained, the tricks of the con man don't change: he still wears a disguise and still uses the same soft-sell lines and hard luck stories. Only the medium is different. He explained that people are conditioned to believe what they see on a computer screen, in the same way that - in the past - they were conditioned to believe what they saw in print.

It's no surprise there are victims, despite how well known the risks are and how long they have been known for.

* The Anti Money Laundering Network is the ultimate owner of ChiefOfficers.Net