DARKMARKETING

often their systems have been compromised by cyber criminals. Journalists find it impossible to get any information out of banks about the cyber attacks that rain down on them daily. That is understandable. What is less excusable is their frequent reluctance to work with police, in case the information be revealed in open court. By refusing to admit that their customers are victims of cybercrime, for fear of losing an edge against their competitors, banks are indirectly assisting the work of criminals.

Of course, the banks have a problem: their customers are the most vulnerable part of the networked financial system. Even the finest hackers would find cracking the computer systems of the major retail and investment banks a challenge these days. But getting into most customers' computers and then watching them access their accounts and, indeed, playing around with the money in those accounts, is child's play for any hacker worth his or her (although usually his) salt. How can one improve one's customers' online habits when the great draw of Internet banking (as with so much of our activity on the Web) is convenience? People are in general put off by elaborate security measures needed to access their accounts, because they're so tedious.

Banks like to keep the extent of fraud quiet partly for competitive reasons and partly because they do not want their customers to demand a return to the old ways. Electronic banking saves them huge sums of money because the customer is carrying out tasks that were once the preserve of branches and their staff. If we were all to refuse to manage our finances via the Internet, banks would be compelled to reinvent the extensive network of branches through which they used to serve us. That would cost an awful lot of money and, as we now know, the banks have spent everything they have, along with hundreds of billions of taxpayers' cash, underwriting egregious speculative ventures and their obscenely inflated bonus payments.

So DS Dawson was obliged slowly to piece together the puzzle with only limited assistance from the banking fraternity. In his favour, however, was the fact that Fred Brown had made a couple of significant errors in constructing his network of fraud: although his bankfraud@yahoogroups.com was registered with yahoo in America, the email address attached to it was yahoo.co.uk. Because it was a British domain name, Dawson was able to subpoena the material from yahoo immediately. He was less fortunate with the Safemail account. He had to