Unleashed | The laissez faire nature of online theft

Starting the day, like many others, going through my emails and texts, there was a text from my bank alerting me to some form of activity on my account. Obviously I ignored it. I receive several of these every day and they generally tend to be from thieves who intend to lull me into a sense of security and then extract bank account details and dates of birth so they can steal my money. I think ?the practice is known, rather politely, ?as 'phishing'.

Nevertheless, 20 minutes later I received a call from somebody who described himself as a fraud officer at the bank and he wanted to know if I had been sending money to a certain company. I had never heard of the company and asked him for more details. He told me not to worry as while the money had left the account, it would be replaced by the bank immediately. At that point I was heartily intrigued and asked him how much money was involved. 'Are you sitting down?' he said and, once I assured him I was, he told me it was very nearly £20,000!

What had happened was that some form of bug, worm or robot had been planted into my computer by something called 'malware' and this had allowed the thief to take money out of my account without ?my knowledge and send it somewhere ?that I had no intention of it going. This is despite the fact that my firm has a state of the art firewall, completely up-to-date ?anti-virus software and an extremely good IT company that looks after us on a day-to-day basis.

The bank was very nice about all of this and true to their word the money was restored within minutes. I even got that rarity from a bank, a nice letter the next day. However, the whole episode did give me pause for thought. First, when I asked the nice chap in the fraud department whether I should report this to the police, he seemed very keen that I should not do so. Call me old fashioned but nicking money from a bank account has always seemed to me rather a serious offence. Indeed, when I used to do criminal law I acted for a particularly nice client who had a character flaw which caused him to enjoy robbing building societies with his shotgun. He never got away with much '“ his average haul was somewhere in the region of £2000 or £3000. When he was eventually convicted he got 18 years in prison. These days the computer hackers manage to get away with far more and it seems to be something of a dirty little secret, which the banks prefer not to publicise and would rather I didn't report to the police. It may be that the police are not particularly interested in this rather boring piece of computer fraud. On the other hand, this is something that is only going to develop and the losses only going to become more substantial.

While I lost nothing in this particular instance, I have had conflicting accounts from the bank as to whether the criminal actually managed to get away with the money or whether he was prevented from doing so at the last minute. I have always found computerised banking enormously helpful. It allows you to be on top of transactions and instead of having to chase up your cash, you can see for yourself when money goes into your account and when money leaves it. However, I also always had a few misgivings about computerised banking. Just as I can send money across the world instantly, I have always thought that there is scope for much skulduggery.

I think the banks felt they had no choice but to introduce computerised banking. After all, progress is progress isn't it? But progress sometimes comes at a price. My fraud officer seemed very much resigned to the fact that this was just another fraud and seemed to be speaking on the basis that he had seen many, many others similar to this. Where will it end?

The pet shop recently suggested Cosmo would like a plastic bone which had the texture of a real bone but none of the risks. Cosmo was not at all interested, much preferring a nice, smelly, gristly cow bone. As I have said before, progress is a funny old thing. It definitely comes at a price.