How Crime Took on the World

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.