Chances are, you’ve received a 419 scam e-mail at some point:  a message, usually typed in all uppercase, telling you about some enormous amount of money someone needs to ship out of some foreign country, with your help – and offering you a sizeable cut of the proceeds.  

Just about anyone who’s used the Internet for a while can spot these scams a kilometer away, but we have to remember that milllions of new users get online for the first time every day, and that’s part of the reason many people get sucked in each year.  

The other big bad guy online business is phishing – one example being the legitimate-looking e-mail from your bank telling you that you need to click here to log in and fix some sort of problem with your account.  According to Consumer Reports, a million victims in the US lost more than 7 billion dollars over the past two years to phishing operations, spyware and virus distributors – those three are often closely tied together.  

Generally speaking, there’s a 25% chance that you’ll eventually become a victim – and if you’re underage and use a social networking site, the chances are probably greater.  

There seems to be a silver lining in all of this for PC manufacturers: last year, almost two million households replaced their virus-infected PCs instead of cleaning them, and 850,000 replaced them because of spyware infestations.  How did they get that way in the first place?  Well, 33% of survey respondents said they don’t use antispyware software, and 3.7 million US households with broadband Internet service don’t use a firewall.  All of which makes it less than surprising that the crooks manage to stay in business year after year.  

Read more at PC World.