However, such schemes never scaled up
to the rank of a proper industry, given the spotty success rate
and the high risks involved. Because we are considering things
on a global scale, we can probably ignore those cases in our
analysis. That said, why is something nearly impossible in our
daily life perhaps the fastest growing crime scheme on the
Internet?
We take for granted some important factors in the of?¬‚ine world
that are barely addressed in the online one. Telling a fake bank
branch from a legitimate one is a snap, but telling a website
from one that is an imitation is apparently much harder for
users. We address this issue in more detail in the section ???The
Babel of Web User Interfaces,??? and we mention server authentication
in the section ???The Babel of Cryptography.??? Stealing our
credentials in the of?¬‚ine world can be dif?¬?cult because it often
(but not always; see the sidebar ???America and Identity Theft???
later in this chapter) requires acquiring a physical document in
our possession, making it much harder (and much more noticeable)
than just copying down the few characters that constitute a
username and a password. Again, we explore that issue in much
deeper detail in the section ???Passwords: Ascent and Decline.
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