You are the victim of identity theft and the fraudster calls your bank to transfer money into their own account. But instead of asking them for your personal details, the bank assistant simply presses a button that causes the phone to produce a brief series of clicks in the fraudster’s ear. A message immediately alerts the bank that the person is not who they are claiming to be, and the call is ended.

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EBay’s (EBAY) PayPal kicked off the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday with a frightening presentation on the “arms race” between online fraudsters and online retailers and shoppers.

Online fraud is becoming so lucrative, said Katherine Hutchison, PayPal’s senior director of global risk management, that it has developed into an industry with specialized players that hire each other in areas such as harvesting credit card numbers and freight forwarding. “A single professional thief doesn’t have to have all of the skills needed to commit fraud,” she said.

Here’s one trick: Fraudsters use telephone services designed for the deaf to get an operator with a friendly (and middle-American) sounding voice to make calls on their behalf to a call center. “The telephone operator could realize this is very likely to be fraud, but they are legally blocked from saying anything other than what the person placing the call tells them to say,” said Hutchison.

Old techniques to track down fraudsters are becoming less helpful, she added.

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Last week, I pulled out my Internet cable, unplugged my USB drives, and searched my Windows machine for Conficker, the astounding computer worm that threatens to wreak global havoc once its latest version begins to phone home for further instructions on April 1. Well, maybe: While security researchers warn that the worm’s creators may be planning on conducting fraud or even “information warfare” aimed at disrupting the Internet, nobody knows what terrible deed Conficker will ultimately pull off. What we do know is that Conficker is devilishly smart, terrifically contagious, and evolving.

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The latest phishing scam on Facebook has raised the question yet again as to whether the social-networking site is dropping the ball on security measures and properly responding to privacy complaints.

Facebook faced consumer fraud charges in 2007 for allegedly responding too slowly to user complaints about harassment, pornography or nudity from the social-networking site. The probe into the company’s safety procedures by New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo resulted in a settlement requirement that Facebook respond to such complaints within 24 hours.

But in a recent string of phishing attacks in which hackers have broken into a user’s Facebook account and hit up his or her friends for money with the online chat tool, pretending to be stranded or robbed, complaints have emerged that the privacy team at Facebook hasn’t responded to users in a timely manner.

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DISH Network (DISH) shares are down sharply this morning after the satellite TV company reported some disturbing subscriber data for Q2.

For the quarter, the company posted revenue of $2.91 billion, right in line with expectations, and profits of 75 cents a share, nicely above the Street consensus at 60 cents.

But the company also noted that it lost 25,000 net subscribers in the quarter. In a 10-Q filing with the SEC this morning, the company blamed the surprise drop in subscribers on “weak economic conditions, aggressive promotional offerings by our competition, the heavy marketing of HD service by our competition, the growth of fiber-based pay TV providers, signal theft and other forms of fraud, and operational inefficiencies at DISH Network.”

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