Don't be stupid online

When people go online, they become kind of stupid. You don’t believe me, go look at Failbook. Under cover of online anonymity, people say and do incredibly dumb things.

But that’s not the only kind of stupid I mean. I recently went along to hear folks from Norton talking about what they termed “cybercrime”. Under that blanket term they were including not merely the obvious things like phishing and fraud, but cyber-bullying and the like.

Basically, anything that you’d call a crime if it happened not online, they called “cybercrime” if it happened online. And the numbers were startling.

For example, 46 percent of people who connect to the internet have been a victim of some form of cybercrime within the past year. Nearly two thirds of people who spend time online have been got at in one way or another.

In some countries that number gets even more startling. In Russia, 92 percent of people who connect to the internet have been victims of cybercrime. That’s staggering. And kind of stupid.

A relative of mine ­– for the sake of anonymity, let’s call him “my father” – recently received an email purporting to be from the Australian Taxation Office, saying they had a refund for him, and needed his bank details so they could transfer it over. Looks legit.

Of course his actual refund had already been transferred over to him by the actual ATO, because the actual ATO already has his account details. That set off a small alarm bell, but he went along with it anyway. It’s not like he was being promised the embezzled millions of a Nigerian prince or anything — just his own money that was due to him from an organisation he should be able to trust. But he went, for a moment, a little stupid.

His bank has subsequently been very helpful in replacing credit cards and changing various details so that the scammers cannot get more out of him. They understand that these things can happen nowadays.

It wasn’t always so. A relative of his – for the sake of anonymity, we’ll call her “his mother” – once had her credit card details scammed one way or another and used for nefarious purposes. She asked a relative – we’ll call him “her grandson” – to call the bank and try to get this thing sorted out.

When I called the bank’s credit fraud department, I encountered a very snarky sort of person, who asked, in an accusatory tone, “did she use her credit card online?” My grandmother – so very comfortable with modern technology that she needed me to telephone the bank – was accused of being careless online and contributing to her misfortune.

That attitude, way back when banks were very new to the whole online thing, was kind of stupid. Likewise, when law enforcement first started looking at the idea of online crime, it acted as if it wasn’t nearly so serious as “real” crime, and handed out nominal penalties, if any.

That was kind of stupid, and to my mind contributed to the problem becoming as widespread as it is now. “Online” isn’t some weird marginal thing, separate to the real world, anymore. The sooner everyone figures that out, the less stupid it will be.