and then steal them off the porch. Another possibility was the thief tried to have it delivered to a different address, but as a precaution, this company only shipped merchandise to the billing address on the card. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, the thief probably allowed it to be sent anyway. What did he care? He wasn't paying for it.
Once I got off the phone with the ski pants company, I called MasterCard and alerted them to the shenanigans with my card. The representative checked my account activity. As of that moment, it showed purchases of $3,600, none of which I had made. They were all Internet purchases, since there was no need for a signature or anything. My card was canceled, and I had to send a notarized affidavit attesting that those were not my charges.
So here I was, one more victim of Internet fraud. The sole time in my life that I used the Internet to attempt to buy something, and just for a minute, I got scammed. I never even completed the transaction, and yet my card number was preserved on the site and someone got hold of it. If this happened to me, who's constantly on the alert for swindles, it shows you how vulnerable computers have made us.
THE PORTABLE THIEF
There's no question about it: the Internet is a criminal's dream come true. Forty million people use the Internet every day, and to a thief, that translates into the ability to cheat an immense number of people all at the same time. Estimates are that more than 5 percent of Internet transactions are fraudulent, compared to less than half of one percent for brick-and-mortar retailers. Every day, thieves are sitting before their terminals, trying to break into somebody's system, working on that way to bypass security.
With the Internet, a thief doesn't need to come to your business or your home to steal from you. He does it by computer. A con man normally had only the ability to reach people through the medium of himself, and so he could only cheat a limited amount of people in a small area. Back in my days pushing bad paper, I was constantly on the move, and I had to be. Part of the reason was to evade capture, but also I needed to find new victims I hadn't yet fleeced. A con man today never has to board a plane. Using the Internet, he can deceive people all over the world, without having to talk to them. He doesn't even have to get dressed.
When it comes to fraud, appearance used to matter. When I started doing check forging, I was sixteen, but I was over six-feet tall. I looked like an adult, and I was able to act the part. If I'd been a bashful, pimply-faced teenager, there would have been no way I could have gotten away with what I did. But with electronic fraud, you don't know who the criminal is. You can't see him or her, because the person is sheltered by the technology's anonymity. You have literally opened yourself up to millions of criminals, and not only domestic ones. When you're on the Internet, you don't know if you're dealing with someone from Nigeria, Syria, Hong Kong, Malaysia, or Buffalo. And have you ever tried to get a refund from another continent? You won't enjoy the experience.
Computer crime, or cybercrime as it's called, is one of the newer forms of fraud, but it's a tremendous growth industry. One of the frightening things about fraud with computers is the speed at which it happens. When people use the Internet, they talk of going on "Internet time," meaning that everything transpires at warp speed. Well, criminals like Internet time too. A well-executed bank robbery, the physical stealing of the money, is going to take a half-hour, easily. With an electronic heist, we're talking a couple of milliseconds.
So much about computers make me uncomfortable, because they're the doorway to limitless amounts of money. Money is continually transferred electronically between banks and financial institutions, trillions of dollars a day flying around the world as electronic pulses. If a hacker slips inside a bank's computer, he can commit bank robbery of unprecedented proportions, with a mouse rather than a gun. Here's a statistic that shocks even me: only 6 percent of all websites are considered secure by experts. That means that 94 percent aren't. The 6 percent are almost all big financial institutions, because they're the only ones willing