Video focuses on victims of e-mail scam

A new documentary-style video, "HCommerce: The Business of Hacking You," puts the focus on the travails of the Spears family of Portland, Ore., which lost about $400,000 when Janella Spears fell for a complex e-mail scam.

The video, sponsored by McAfee and posted at www.stopHcommerce.com, includes commentary from an array of observers and characters, including JOHnnyhax and the now graying phone phreak of the 1970s, Cap'n Crunch. But the film is at its best when it focuses on the victims of cybercrime, in this case the Spears family, which fell for an e-mail scam promising the lost fortune of a dead relative, J.B. Spears, in Africa.

The documentary tells how Janella Spears, avidly interested in genealogy, was convinced the lost fortune of J.B. Spears was out there as the crime group going after her money even showed her a death certificate for him.

Most poignant is the aftermath as she works to regain the confidence and affection of her husband, Tom, disabled through deafness, using their own intimate sign language.

"HCommerce: The Business of Hacking You" is a McAfee-sponsored project, and not surprisingly, it includes a lot of footage of computer clean-ups. But the film is a sober-minded treatise on cybercrime's many dangers, including botnets and distributed denial-of-service attacks, that explains the huge scope of today's problems.