Getting Burned

There was a story this week in the New York Times Travel section that I had to dig up and show to my readers (assuming I have readers) because I think it’s such a perfect emblem of our changing times. It’s a column by the Times’ “budget travel” correspondent about finding a good (but not outrageously good) offer for a room to rent for a few days in London, ignoring all of the warning signs that would make a regular Internet user laugh, sneer, and possibly sic the nice people from Scambaiters on the scam artist, and the columnist’s feelings on finding out he had been scammed. He admits it’s one of the most common stories (and types of story) of the day, and even deals with the difficulty that otherwise smart people have with accepting their failure to detect this sort of fraud, but the historian in me thinks that even so he may be missing the point…

Consider, if you will, the simple crime of mail fraud. There was a time – not that long ago – when most of the cybercrime we hear about today could not have existed, because there was no Internet. Most of the telephone scams that we’ve all learned not to fall for didn’t exist either, and identity theft wouldn’t have been possible. Mail fraud still existed, of course; there is good reason to believe that every civilization that has ever had a postal service has also had crime based around it, but none of the other communications fraud we find ourselves plagued with today did. Many people did not have credit cards; some didn’t have checking accounts, and the ATM hadn’t been invented yet, so no one had an ATM card. Even basic things like software piracy, theft of sound files, or electronic copyright violations didn’t even exist. Got the picture? Now consider that this time wasn’t the Colonial era, or the Civil War, or even the Industrial Revolution; the conditions I’ve just described were pretty much the way things stood when I was a child – a mere 40 years ago…

You still hear the occasional news item about elderly people falling for phone scams, but the dementia patients aside, no one under the age of 70 is ever likely to do that. The unusually ignorant still fall for the various “Nigerian” scams, but there’s no way anyone currently under the age of 20 ever will, and most people between 20 and 60 probably know better too. People have suggested that the scammers on Craig’s list (and dozens of similar places) will eventually die off, or that Craig’s List itself will, but I doubt it; people have been scrawling business propositions of dubious reliability on restroom walls since the Roman Empire was still a republic, and that hasn’t prevented people from doing exactly the same thing this very morning. The difference is that while nobody would ever believe the things you find written on the Men’s room wall, people still believe some of the things they see online on even weaker evidence. But I don’t believe that will be the case for much longer…

It seems probable to me, both as a professional business analyst and an amateur historian, that one day in the very near future the early days of the Internet will seem just as distant – and just as quaint – as life in the 1960s seems now, or as life in the 1920s seemed to us then. Measures will be invented to verify business transactions online, and scammers will invent ways to circumvent them, just as has happened with hackers, credit card fraud, and counterfeiting, and the cycle will go on as it always has. The average person may be a little more jaded than they were in 1930 or even 1970, but they will not be living their lives in fear of con artists anymore than they have in any other historical era. Life will go on, as Life is wont to do, until only the very confused, very foolish, very young and very old, or completely demented believe any unverified claims they see online, and taking a classified post on Craig’s List at face value becomes an early symptom of the onset of senility…

Heaven only knows what new types of fraud will be common by then, of course. Personally, I can wait…