My job as part entrepreneur part adventurer has taken me all over the world.

I have a sense of adventure and was fortunate enough to be born in a Australia where freedom and fiancee met somewhere in the middle and I was able to explore and have the means to travel the world and work from my laptop.

Although I have been to more countries than I can remember, the things that stand out to me the most are the aspects of humanity that scares me the most, the stuff that haunts my dreams. That is the poor, the poverty, the people who have no choice and no hope.

Only recently I spent a few years in the Philippines working for myself, but mostly because I really love that part of the world.

To begin with I was just a tourist.  But the more time you spend somewhere, the more people you meet and get to know, and the layers start pealing back.

I was fortunate enough to be born of great parents in Australia who worked their whole lives to provide for me and my sister. Until heading overseas I had never experienced true poverty but I thought I new what it was because I had seen it on Television and in movies.

But it is completely different in real life; desperation has its own smell and flavour.

A lot of very desperate people

I am not condoning the behaviour of the people who make viruses and commit computer crime but I do understand why so many do it.

I am not talking about the 15 year old boy who want s a new playstation, sitting in his garage, looking for ways to make some quick money. I am talking about the desperate. And there are lots of them!

I am talking about the legions of poor people we don’t see, sitting around Internet cafes 24 hours a day, instead of going to school or leading what we consider a normal life.

A lot of the time your credit card is only being used for a couple of dollars a month and you might not even notice it.

And a lot of people ask, “Why do they bother”? But $2’s feeds a lot of people in some countries.

Robbery occurs over your telephone line (not through your window)

I know there are a lot of people out there scamming and writing computer viruses because they want a new TV or just for fun. But they are the few.

A lot of the places where a most of the computer viruses are coming from are simply just very poor.

There are a lot of people just trying to survive and they come from countries where the police don’t even care about their own people. So they definitely don’t care about us over here being ripped off.

Most people in Townsville now get robbed over their telephone line.

I rarely meet anyone who has someone come into their house and hold them up with a gun or knife.  But I am pretty sure I meet people every day who have been scammed out of money or had a virus or spyware on their computer and have had someone access their bank account or use their credit card.

You are a target

When you live in a country like Australia where even the lowest wage is significantly greater that many countries best, you are a target.

There all these poor people all over the world with cheap access to the internet; some just want to survive, others want to profit. And because of internet access they no longer need to catch an aeroplane, find where you live and break your window to steal from you.

The telephone line gives them direct access into your living room computer and access into your life and finances.

The internet is like any other aspect of your life. There are people who will love you and people who will hurt you. Be careful and don’t let your guard down because you are sitting in your living room behind your computer monitor!