The Lounge Lizard – cyber investigator

The Lounge Lizard was interested to see that personal bank account details are apparently for sale over the Internet for as little as £5.

So says Symantec, the Internet security firm, who also report that UK bank account details were the most advertised items on black-market forums used to trade stolen information.

Now, The Lizard is neither a criminal nor is he tremendously adept with the laptop but he decided to do a little investigative reporting and tried looking for these elusive bank details on the net – to see how easy they are to find. He didn’t get very far.

At one point things were looking up as someone was offering all the child benefit details the government had lost, and The Lizard thought he could perform a public service - retrieve the information and hand it back to a tearful and grateful government.

He then considered that awkward questions might be asked as to what he was doing with the stuff in the first place at which point The Lounge Lizard’s career as a razor sharp investigative hack came to an abrupt end.

Of course it’s much easier if you just publish your bank account details in your weekly column as the petrol head funster Jeremy Clarkson decided to do.

The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of the above mentioned child benefit disks.

Unwisely, he wanted to prove it was all a fuss about nothing.

Next thing he knew he had unexpectedly donated £500 to charity.

“I was wrong and I have been punished” was his unusually mild response.