With just a few weeks to go before the football world cup kicks off in South Africa, my inbox is already starting to fill up with related spam and press releases. I’m a Rugby Union man through and through, a very happy one as it just so happens that I’m a Leicester Tigers fan, and have very little time for anything to do with soccer. Unless it’s the type you spell SOCA, that is. When the Serious Organised Crime Agency gets serious about organised criminal gangs participating in British cybercrime to the tune of £3.5 billion a year, anyone with an interest in online security has to sit up and take notice.

SOCA has warned that the bad guys are endlessly inventive, even going as far as impersonating SOCA officials themselves in order to perpetrate fraud recovery scams where victims are counselled with help to recover lost money, but in actual fact just end up getting fleeced all over again.

If you honestly think it cannot happen to you, or someone you know, then think again. When the crime business is so big as to be worth £3.5 billion a year, it’s big enough to touch anyone who is not constantly vigilant - and that includes everyone from the individual consumer to the biggest enterprise.

VeriSign, for example, conducted research recently which concluded that as many as 11 percent of the online UK population has been a victim of online ID fraud over the past year. Each of those victims losing, on average, some £352. “Soca’s research further highlights how criminals are continuing to widen the techniques they use to target their victims, with online fraud now a major industry” says Matthew Bruun, a security expert at VeriSign.

Which is why SOCA made today, June 1st, a global day of action and awareness to fight back against the scammers. Apparently. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been much evidence of this getting any great media coverage which kind of suggests that most people find cybercrime about as interesting as I find football. And that, dear reader, is very worrying indeed.