Good con artists make an art of preying on people's fears, hopes, dreams and good intentions, and there's probably no end to the list of con schemes being perpetrated via the Web. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and the Web's openness is proving to be a seduction too strong to resist for ever-greater numbers of largely self-taught Web fraudsters around the world.
The very same attributes of Net culture that appeal to the better aspects of human nature -- the urge to learn, to inform and to communicate across boundaries -- also appeal strongly to its darker side. Largely beyond the reach of national governments and supranational agencies, the fast-growing threat of increasingly large-scale, organized financial crime lurking on the Web raises the question of what public and private IT security organizations can and are doing to address it.
