MR HYDE OF LAGOS

New Jersey, Rostock, Lilongwe or deepest Ruritania would immediately
log it. Bingo! Mi casa es su casa! Or, more to the point, Mi cuenta
bancaria es su cuenta bancaria!*

Just as having thousands of credit-card details and bank-account
numbers sitting on your computer is not a crime, nor is storing a key-
logger virus. It may be a strong indication of criminal activity, but it
does not amount to a case. Ploughing through the endless files, Dawson
and another colleague had to untangle the hundreds of jumbled threads.

After manually inputting several thousand account details onto an
Excel spreadsheet, the police then decided to approach the banks.
Eminently sensible, one might think, for after all it is the banks' secu-
rity systems that Fred Brown had breached so successfully.

Think again.

Many of Dawson's enquiries ran into a brick wall because the banks
simply did not bother to respond to his requests. The detective was
pushed for time throughout the investigation, and much was wasted
on futile attempts to persuade banks to cooperate.

The attitude of most banks to cybercrime is ambiguous. While
writing this book, a gentleman from my bank, NatWest, called me and
asked if I had made any recent purchase at a jewellers in Sofia, the
capital of Bulgaria. Furthermore, he enquired whether I had spent
4,000 francs settling a bill with Swiss Telecom. I said that I had not.
I was then told that my NatWest Visa card had been compromised,
that I would need a new one, but that I could be safe in the knowledge
that NatWest had cancelled the £3,000 for which the card had been
fraudulently used. Like everyone else who goes through that experience,
I was hugely relieved when the bank gently reassured me that I was
not liable.

But who is actually paying for that? The bank? No, they are insured
against such losses. The insurance company? No, because they set the
premiums at a level that ensures they don't lose out. So maybe it is
the bank after all, given that they're paying the premiums? Yes. But
they recoup the money by levelling extra charges on all consumers.
Essentially, bank fraud is paid for by all bank customers.

This is something that banks understandably do not wish to have
widely advertised. Similarly, they do not like the public to learn how

* 'My bank account is your bank account.'