Internet crime in Brazil – a BBC listening

OK so i don’t want to scare anybody but you might like to listen to this…

its a BBC radio documentary series about Internet Crime and they made a special programme here in Brazil about internet crime and fraud because this country is the home of this new phenomenon…

the listening is here http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20080516-1749.mp3

and here is some background information from the BBC site

The fastest growing sector of global organised crime is cyber-crime. Internet banking and credit-card fraud is increasing at a rate of about 40 percent per year and is estimated to be worth around $100 billion annually.

Brazil produces more cyber-criminals than any other nation.

As Misha Glenny finds out in the final part of this series, How Crime Took on the World, there are particular reasons for this – not least the fact that Brazil has one of the most sophisticated banking systems in the world. This is because for many years, the Brazilians operated a protectionist economic system, and therefore developed its own highly skilled IT workforce.

And there is a rich, tempting market for cyber criminals in Brazil. Although only 14 percent of the population are regular internet users, that’s still close to 30 million people. Three-quarters of them do the bulk of their financial transactions on line.

In Sao Paulo Misha meets some of Brazil’s spammers and hackers. He has online conversations with a cyber criminal known as ‘Slack’ whose group makes over $7,000 a month – a very sizeable sum in this developing nation. He also meets ‘Fabio’, a poor man from one of the favelas who is unashamedly learning the skills of a hacker in order to commit crime.

At the Federal Police headquarters, the officer in charge tells Misha they receive an average of thirty reports of cyber crime a day – far more than the cyber unit can deal with. And the fear is that as more and more people become computer literate, there will be a still further exponential rise in this quintessential crime for the 21st century.

Misha Glenny is the author of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. 

Chinese Terracotta Army

I just found a nice podcast from the Guardian newspaper about the exhibition last year at the British Museum of various parts of the collection of the Terracotta Army.

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I studies it a little at school but my knowledge is extremely limited, so it was good to have the Podcast. I then went to the Museum website and downloaded the educational guide which you might also find interesting.

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