The next week he calls 125 people, and so on. But now we have the Internet, a far less labor-intensive medium. Identity theft, in particular, is thriving online. When his office began keeping track of the crime a few years back, says Hugh Stevenson of the Federal Trade Commission, they received a couple hundred complaints a week. Today, the weekly tally is about 2000.
ID theft is by no means the only Web-driven scam.
The age-old Spanish Prisoner con, for instance, has found new life on the Internet. If you help provide a ransom, or funds to bankroll an escape, the prisoner will share his or her massive fortune with you. These days, for some reason, the scam originates mainly in Nigeria, and the prisoner is the bank account of a dead dignitary. The cash you put up is supposed to go toward paying an attorney to thaw the dead guy s account. There is, of course, no dignitary, no bank account, and no windfall for anyone but the grifter.