Bobbies on the beat won’t stop the cyber crime wave

One morning last week, in the early hours, I received a puzzling text from my bank. ‘Did you use your debit card at 01.23 at Tenorshare.com?’ it said. I’d never heard of Tenorshare before – it’s a smartphone support service apparently – and had certainly never knowingly made any payments to them. But someone had attempted to, by using my bank card details. When I contacted my bank, I was asked about another payment, to Wetherspoons, at ten to midnight on a Saturday night. Once again: not me, I was asleep in bed. 

‘We’re blocking your card and sending you a new one,’ said the assistant on the phone. ‘Your card details must have got onto the dark web from a data leak.’

Ah, the dark web, that hidden part of the internet accessed only through specialist software and frequented, it is said, by crypto-currency traders, computer hackers, fraudsters and people seeking child abuse images.