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I remember the scam well. Everyone was talking about it. “Did you hear about the guy who programmed the bank’s computer to round off all of the interest from every single savings account and then transfer all of the half-cents to his own account?”
While the criminal take was substantially less than a million dollars (which, back then, was a far greater amount of money than it is by today’s standards), the mystique involved nearly turned the perpetrator into a cult hero. All I knew about computers at that time was that they were massive machines that cost an astronomical amount and required absolute temperature control—so when I heard the story about the interest rounding scam, I was duly impressed by the creativity inherent in the plot. The crime had a foreign ring to it – something new, something apart from the ordinary.
In retrospect, it was the birth of computer technology fraud schemes. It was the first tale circulated in which computer technology had been used to fuel a new kind of crime. And therein lay the fascination.
That was twenty years ago. And with each technological advance since that time has come a new set of scams. ATMs, cellular telephones, stripping machines, color copiers, smart computers, the gamut. In tandem with the advances, however, come a new subgroup of crooks, as well as one of investigative specialists.
Crooks are never going to disappear. There is just too much money at stake. In recent years, technology may have become the medium in which they grow, mutate, and grow some more. Where is tomorrow leading?
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