“Cybercrime is out of control.”

So says Caleb Barlow, Vice President at IBM Security.  And if you’re already worried about credit card fraud and Russian hacking, you may not want to read any further.

On the other hand, there’s a lesson for all of us from the world of virtual villainy.

Most of us have come to accept internet espionage, phishing emails, and scam artists as part of life, the virtual equivalent of political kickbacks, muggings, and drive-by shootings.  We don’t like them; but the real world is not a perfect world, so we learn to take the bad with the good.

In a recent Ted Talk, Caleb Barlow offered a terrifying and surreal account of criminal organizations operating like professional, legitimate businesses, with English-speaking help desks and fake banking websites.  They operate anonymously on the Dark Web, which most of us relate to as something from a Kiefer Sutherland thriller.

But it’s real.  So real, in fact, that if you stumbled across a dark website you’d think you were shopping on Amazon or checking reviews on Angie’s List.

Read the whole article here.