No TURNING BACK

on message boards for young parents. If you are paying for adverts on the television, radio or billboards, you are hitting the skydivers as well, but to no real purpose (unless, of course, the skydivers happen also to be young parents).

Second, you can calibrate the success and the cost of advertising. Each time a young mum or dad clicked on the nappy ad, this would register with both the nappy manufacturer and the advertiser. The advertising company then got paid according to the number of clicks. Advertisers and sellers were then able to analyse the so-called Click Through Rate (CTR), so that our nappy manufacturer could see how, out of 100 visitors to the skydiving site, none of them clicked on the advert. But on the young parents’ message board, ten out of 100 visitors clicked on the site, giving a 10 per cent CTR – and the advertising firm would be paid accordingly. Before long the CTR had spawned Click Fraud.

An administrator on one of the forums that Matrix visited was involved in a scam. He encouraged Matrix to use the servers he controlled to set up a program that would click automatically on banner ads at intervals. Each time he did it, he earned a cent. He didn’t even know it was illegal. The administrator then told him that there was another forum that he should look at where similar matters were discussed, and it was on this forum, CarderPlanet, that he learned about credit-card fraud for the first time.

Matrix crossed the Rubicon in a psychological trance, unable to perceive the waters swirling around him. He was a kid and he was sliding into crime, slowly, incrementally. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he maybe knew that something was wrong, but the boundaries in cyberspace are very blurred, if indeed they are visible at all.