International and home grown experts say children are being targetted by cyber criminals.

The Hi-Tech Crime Symposium on the Gold Coast is examining how identity theft and cyber crime are dominating the international criminal landscape.

Clare Hunter reports.

TRANSCRIPT

Cyber crime, identity theft, and credit card skimming are buzz words we are all familiar with, but police fear children are the new targets in the online world.

Superintendent Brian Hay, Qld Police: “Children today are the victims of tomorrow and we have got to do something about it. We have to get the message across.”

Children as young as 13 are targeted by cyber criminals through social networking sites, who store their details for future use.

Superintendent Brian Hay, Qld Police: “And the crooks can wait until they’ve got your identity. In five years you might find you have a credit card taken out in your name and you have a debtor reincurred, we have got to think long term.”

The Queensland Police have been trying to teach kids to be vigilant on the net.

The threat to children is one of the major talking points at the Hi-Tech Crime Symposium.

Credit cards and how to protect them from international fraudsters was also on the agenda.

Superintendent Brian Hay: “A lot of the time we have money extracted and collected in businesses overseas why not get a credit card that is only applicable in Australia?”

Among the delegates are global experts from the FBI and the Turkish police who provided a rare insight into the intricate world of hi-tech crime.

Today’s key note speaker was a US Secret Service agent who was responsible for cracking the world’s biggest credit card fraud syndicate, and like any good Hollywood movie operation Carder Chaos involved undercover cops over 34 different countries, with stolen funds amounting to a whopping $110 million US dollars.

The symposium runs until Thursday.

Clare Hunter, QUT News