They were probably all searching for a couple of scratched CDs holding the names, addresses and bank details of every UK parent with kids under 16, and, 'Whilst they are about it, on behalf of the Royal Navy, would they keep their eyes skinned for a battered laptop with TOP SECRET, NOT TO BE ALLOWED TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF AL QAEDA, emblazoned upon its lid and harbouring the details of every member of all three HM’s armed forces, for the past two hundred years?'

Government, whom we are all supposed to trust, has, during the past few years, awarded itself massive data sharing powers. As a result, the consequences for our population have often turned out to be far from beneficial.

By being forced to divulge our most intimate details to Inland Revenue, Customs and Excise (now, apparently both lumped together as HMRC), The Voters Register, insurance companies, credit card operators and even the ubiquitous supermarket reward card, means that almost anyone working for a credit agency, District, or County Council or Police, no matter how humble his/her position may be, and with the most basic working knowledge of the Internet, can now find out absolutely anything about our personal affairs, without incurring the wrath of data protection laws, or The Human Rights Act.

They can exploit every last one of us financially, or publish pictures of our grannies, or girlfriends, all naked and wrinkly (the grannies, that is; no guy would ever publicly admit he has a wrinkly girlfriend?), onto Facebook, or Bebo, without a moment’s hesitation as to the potential consequences of any such action.

Or just chuck the whole bally shooting match out with the rubbish. Just as an aside. Is it not we who are currently sending most of our old computers out to China for re-processing? Security! We don’t really know the meaning of the word anymore.

And who was it that announced, not many months ago, that, 'the Internet is as lawless as The Wild West?' Our government, that’s who, so spare a thought for that little gem of bureaucratic wisdom, the next time you fill in your online tax return, or entrust your bank details to the hotel chain where you booked your room for the next Southampton Boat Show.

Sleep soundly
You used to sleep soundly in your bunk at night, trusting that your bank was keeping most of your money, minus the loose change in your trouser pockets, safely locked in a burglar proof vault.

The only way a thief could get at it was to break into your house and hope you’d left a book with a handful of signed cheques lying around. Even then, the blighter wasn’t home-and-dry. The human, MK1 Eyeball, might still notice that the guy on the other side of the glass looked nothing like the fellow he had become accustomed to talking to for the past decade.

However, if we cannot trust, we cannot function at the most basic of levels. It’s taken a couple of decades for computers, in general, and the Internet, in particular, to achieve the current level of confidence and credibility, which it now enjoys.

Just as we trust that we can place one foot in front of the other without the ground collapsing from under our next step, we are expected to accept as totally credible, the information glibly offered, just a mouse-click away.

With the advent of computer generated graphics playing a hand in almost everything we used to believe was real, our computer monitors and TV screens lie to us through their micro chipped, virtual reality teeth, and continue to get away with it, hook, line and sinker.

I’m thoroughly fed up with computerised TV adverts inviting me to buy the sleek new Vauxhall, leaping out at me from the watery depths of my telly screen, its contents more akin to the grizzly by-catch of a Spanish tuna boat.

What? That much car for £7,950! But what am I to do with all those squealing dolphins you’re throwing in with the deal? They’ll get my seats wet and I hate the smell of fish.

Providing you have the eyesight of a Euro-Fighter pilot and the reactions of the latest dual-core processor, only then will you find the miniscule small print at the bottom of your telly, which only just spans the 625th line, confirming: If you really do need a small car capable of tripling as a submarine, jet-ski and marine aquarium for endangered species, then you can order a Corsa from your local dealer, but one sporting all of the above features, notwithstanding alloy wheels, panoramic windscreen and metallic paint, is going to set you back just short of seven million quid.

Pass off
Truth is, what the advertising boys really don’t want us to spot, and with the advent of Internet websites, never has there been a better time to pass off unregulated porkies with the intention of extracting money from unwary punters.

Yacht broker David Jones of Barbican Yacht Agency, Plymouth, very nearly became one such victim, when he became in danger of suffering a court judgement for over £2,300 to a Mr Paul Fletcher, 'fabricator’ and owner of a boat auction website, named www.Marinebid.co.uk

It transpired that Jones had become embroiled, along with a handful of other UK brokers, into a specific type of net-naughtiness, which the USA, always ahead of the game as far as the Internet and IT are concerned, had branded Click-Fraud.

Mr Fletcher, but minus all the dolphins this time, had created a very plausible and colourful front page web-image of boats, boating and various ‘pictures of a nautical flavour’, by reproducing dozens of company logos. They were all accompanied by the addresses and telephone numbers of many major players within our industry, such as Seastart, All at Sea magazine, the RNLI, several big insurance companies, building societies and even British Airways, as well as attaching direct links from his website to all of theirs. So the stage was set.

Mr F employed Poplar Publishing at Milton Keynes, to carry out an intensive Tele-sales campaign, but company owner, Helena Hughes, told me: 'Sadly! Despite all our efforts, we failed to attract one single customer. The businesses we called just did not believe what Mr Fletcher insisted we tell them.'

Mr F and his sales representative, Mark Chidwick, embarked upon attempting to sell advertising contracts to the UK yacht broking fraternity by employing high-pressure telephone sales techniques. Both men used veiled threats accompanied by a signed contract collection service via Mailboxes Ltd.

Mr F and Mr C, sounding more like refugees from Reservoir Dogs, were trying to lure brokers into signing contracts entitling Marinebid to ‘lift’ their entire boat sales listings and put them up for auction on his own Marinebid website.

Incidentally, no boat owner, unless they contacted Fletcher directly, had any knowledge that their yachts were up for auction. If a boat sale had been achieved, Fletcher intended to charge the broker a commission for Marinebid’s involvement.

Small print
But, as in the case of most contracts, the small print needed the magnifying power of an electron microscope for anyone to spot the clause informing brokers that all visits to any boat listing, no matter to whom and from where, would incur a charge per mouse click for each and every contract holder within Fletcher's allegedly burgeoning internet empire.

So what is Click-Fraud? According to those Informed Beings, on the other side of The Pond, they know there to be a mighty hoard of incredibly IT savvy, Eastern Europeans and Pakistanis, genetically pre-selected to possess 10 fingers on each hand, all clamouring to suffer Repetitive Stress Syndrome to click upon refresh buttons at a targeted website, with shiploads of mice, 24/7, for the price of a bag of beans.

It is also said, that there are deceptively cunning little electronic devices capable of performing the same service, but minus the arthritis. And that is how unscrupulous Internet traffic can be generated.

Fletcher was not really doing anything new as far as, publishing in general, was concerned. Readers must have something to read and pages need to be filled.

Revenue producing advertisers don’t enjoy being surrounded by empty spaces, so adverts find themselves repeated, or increased in size. Past advertisers appear free of charge, etc, etc.

However, Fletcher seemed willing to take things much further by extracting hundreds of business names and addresses from long outdated marine publications and boat show brochures, placing them into a tome entitled Classified Directory.

A huge number of totally genuine traders had ended up unwittingly lending massive credibility to Marinebid’s bogus claims to Internet success.

I telephoned many of Fletcher’s alleged advertisers, few had heard of Fletcher, or his representative, Mark Chidwick, who appended the letters MBA after his name.

The Motor Boat Association
I telephoned Chidwick and asked him how he had achieved an MBA. 'I’m a member of the Motor Boat Association,' he informed me. 'And I no longer work for Marinebid, I couldn’t get the commission Paul Fletcher owed me' (little wonder, eh? Ed).

Apart from a handful of businesses who were now regularly receiving bills for thousands of pounds from a website that almost nobody have ever heard of, when proof of Mr F’s, far from kosher skulduggery emerged, that he was just trawling-up bogus contributors, after a company, Prince Cruisers, appeared in one of his classified sections.

Prince Cruisers had never existed. It was the fictitious brainchild of a former owner of a boating business publication and no prizes for guessing which one!

And when senior company managers were made aware of what Fletcher was up to, they demanded total removal. British Airways threatened Mr F with the aeronautical equivalent of a jolly good keel hauling if he failed to remove their flag logo from his site. And in like manner, the RYA also promised to gently drag what remained of Mr F over a few more barnacles, unless he terminated his association with theirs, pronto.

But to my amazement, the RNLI press officer at Poole told me: 'We need all the free publicity we can get, so I do recall something about giving someone permission to reproduce our logo on a website.' Yeah! Right! Thanks for your support, RNLI!

I’ll remember that the next time I’m passing one of your RNLI collection boxes.

Fletcher made it impossible to remove any boat photos on his auction site, despite claiming to have sent his customers unique access codes intended to enable addition or removal. Many of the 179 listed sailing boats were duplicated, had already been sold, or withdrawn by their owners, but all were irretrievably featured. The same 68 listings appeared repeatedly within diverse categories such as Working Boats, Ships, Dinghies and Motor Cruisers.

No evidence
And in addition, no evidence was ever produced, that an auction had taken place.

Once a credit card number was obtained from a broker, Mr F continued to remove money from the account until the broker was forced to cancel his card.

Fletcher claimed that Marinebid’s statistics were independently monitored by AW Stats, Statcounter, or Alexa.

His 'Independent auditors' turned out to be just American freeware programmes, which anyone can download onto a PC. All of these programmes count mouse clicks, but they don’t do anything more. They cannot tell you where contacts have come from, but they do provide evidence of Internet activity, genuine, or otherwise. One - www.statcounter.com - goes as far as suggesting, in its instructions to users, that lies can be told about the actual number of page visits to specific websites, by setting counters artificially high, 'to make it more attractive for your page visitors'.

Why promote dishonesty and subterfuge within a concept that only survives with the trust and credibility of its users?

Some protection from activity counters can be obtained by regularly cleaning out your computer’s cookies file. Statistics counters place a cookie on your computer and allow another computer, anywhere on earth, to record what you do.

Type COOKIES into the FIND FILES AND FOLDERS section in START. Open the file and click EDIT. SELECT ALL and click DELETE. Whoosh………

All of your little spies are now in your RECYCLE BIN. Open up the bin and click DELETE once more, and they are gone forever. Well, at least until you log back on to the Internet to start re-accumulating more of the little nasties.

Extortion, threatening behaviour via telephone and emails and passing-off, should all be attractive prospects for investigation, as far as The Plod are concerned, but not a bit of it.

Pointy helmets
They can’t get the contents of their pointy helmets around the concept of Internet fraud and refused to take the tiniest peep at Marinebid. Trading Standards were equally slothful and said: 'We have not received enough complaints and so we won’t investigate just yet.'

As far as Fletcher was concerned, he seemed convinced he had written himself a legally binding licence to print money at a whopping £5.00 per thousand page loads. He claimed, in a letter to Plymouth County Court: 'There were 431,894 page loads (site visit clicks) between May and November, amounting to a liability to David Jones, of £2,155.00 by potential boat buyers to the Marinebid website.'

In a letter to Plymouth Court, Fletcher wrote: 'The plaintiff considers this to be a test case and any moneys awarded to the plaintiff will be donated to help poverty in Africa'

How about that for proof that you’re a really decent guy and running a cracker of a website! Fletcher was planning to use the strength of the British justice system to enforce any future financial claims he chose to make.

According to the wording of his contract, not only was Fletcher expecting to get away with charging outrageous sums for all the untraceable site visits he was currently claiming to be receiving, but if a contract holder refused to pay, he would have achieved an entirely legal rubber stamp to claim Marinebid’s future loss of income from every errant contract holder, at his allegedly proven monthly hit rate.

In the same letter to Plymouth court, Fletcher admitted that he had closed Marinebid down, pending the outcome of his court case. On reflection, perhaps a wise move, considering the level of notoriety his apparent scam was now beginning to attract within the marine industry.

Anyone, no matter how remotely connected with boat sales, knows only too well, how hard it is to generate enough genuine sales leads to guarantee Cash and a Splash.

But Fletcher’s apparent total lack of any working knowledge of the true numbers of REAL customers swilling around in our industry, became his true downfall.

By the time the case eventually came to court, what I had truly hoped would be a dramatic exposé of blatant fraud, turned into a bit of a damp squib.

The judge ruled Fletcher’s contract was unenforceable, nevertheless very good news for a handful of yacht brokers, but considering Marinebid had already faded from sight and site, the only visible upshot was Jones kept his money and learned a valuable lesson not to trust quite so readily the next time someone phoned him with an offer he was unable to see, or touch.

Fletcher drove back to Leicester empty handed. And the starving Africans? Well, by all accounts, they’re still starving…