Internet bureaucrats protect us against everything except online crime

Petty scam, identity thefts galore

I'm sure you've personally been offered the scam that was perpetrated-a big smiling face of Mel Gibson, or a similarly high-profile celebrity with an appeal to an older demographic, accompanied by words implying they have a financial secret and you will never have to work again. Story continues below advertisement

Despite being a connoisseur of online scams with a track record for stringing scammers along and wasting their time I've never been tempted to click on this one-it seems like a fairly boilerplate kind of scam. But apparently it works, with victims losing an average of A$5,882 (US$3,880) each.

That's a bit more than petty theft and seems to me to qualify as a larger online harm than a bit of bullying, or some abuse, or God forbid, contradicting the government.

The scam is so obvious and ubiquitous you have to wonder why the authorities have failed to do something thus far, and also why Facebook hosts the ads.

You can't just buy an ad on Facebook, you and your ad have to go through a vetting process.

With a system like that, there is every chance that Facebook can be legally implicated in the consequences of the fraud by arguing that they benefited from them via payments from advertisers for running the ads and that, at the least, they were recklessly unconcerned as to their legitimacy.

This may give the victims an option for claiming damages, or for one of the corporate regulators to fine them enough to compensate for the losses.

But then the other scam I see consistently is friend requests from fraudulent profiles which should have never been allowed to be registered.

There's Sarah Scott from Samsung who approached me a couple of times.

The first time, she looked sufficiently real that I accepted, only to be told that I had won money in some purported Samsung competition. Bye bye Sarah, it could have been a lovely friendship.

There's also the odd CCP agent-invariably female, single, living in Australia, but with all ports before being Chinese.

And even panhandling preachers from India and Africa.