I was having our weekly cigar meeting with the a local security guy when we stumbled across a pretty funny thought. There’s a pretty good paper put out by Cybersource about trends for 2008 in which it had a graph showing that as a percentage of online transactions fraud was dropping. Whoah! That’s not what I expected to hear. But then in closer examination that’s a red herring, because total fraud is still increasing at the same rate it always has. Not so good after-all, it just means consumer spending is out pacing the bad guys. That makes it worth being in the business of online retailing, but spending will eventually taper off with population growth.

The funny part of the story is what if all the consumers finally hit a tipping point where they just decided to go home and stop using the Internet completely? What if we just had bad guys trying to phish bad guys, and spammers just trying to spam other spammers? What would the Internet be when every page was a scam and every person on it was desperate for money because all the people who they wanted to scam went outside to go play in the grass? A funny thought! Hey, we were having cigars, so what if we were getting a little off topic!