The researchers' specific findings included evidence that some blog-hosting services have permitted an explosion of phony doorway pages.
The most common frauds were fake e-mail messages and phony Web pages, and the crimes were organized from the United States, Britain, Nigeria, Canada, Romania and Italy, according to an F.B.I. report issued last month.
Some identity thieves do go straight to the Internet, hacking into databases or using "phisher sites" -- phony Web pages that mimic real banking and e-commerce sites in order to entice victims to hand over sensitive information.
There is a phony newspaper front page hanging in her office with a banner headline: "Jackie Stops Talking: City Island Stunned".
Recipients were asked to click on a link to a phony Gmail login page that gave the hackers access to their personal accounts.
A link embedded in the e-mails sent recipients to a stunningly realistic but phony AOL billing page, where they could input their credit card numbers.
UPDATE 12.14.09: The phony "Larry Bergman" Facebook page has mysteriously disappeared.
As Kenneth D. Rose writes in his new book "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture," the Federal Civil Defense Administration encouraged the new literature, which included phony newspaper front pages and whole magazines devoted to describing a fictional post-apocalyptic world -- in deeply purple prose.
From there, players stumbled, link by link, through an astonishingly large, diverse and odd collection of Web sites: anti-robot militia pages, pro-A.I. pages and phony corporate sites offering intelligent robotic homes.
In addition to primers on subjects like phishing (in which criminals try to steal personal information from someone online by posing as a well-known company or institution), and pharming (rerouting users to phony Web sites), the cybercrime page, a portal for information from the F.B.I., is chock full of sobering statistics.
