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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.’

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