Sadly, people still believe they can help that relative of a despot in Nigeria who needs their help to access millions, perhaps billions, of dollars.
As the online scams continue to roll through email in-boxes, others believe they have won a lottery they never entered or that there really is a long lost, hugely wealthy, dead relative they have never heard of and that the kind and diligent lawyer will help them to get access to the estate.
AVG Australia-New Zealand manager Lloyd Borrett said that every year most of the security vendors' forecasts predict dramatic spikes in volumes of spam, phishing, botnet activity and malware.
"Unfortunately, every year these predictions come true.
"While we'd prefer not to be sowing seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt, the cyber criminals are succeeding on such a scale, and making so much money, that each year they are able to invest in better and more automated ways to run their rapidly expanding and increasingly sophisticated operations."
Once again, AVG could safely predict that in 2010 the threat environment would look much like this year, except that it would have more of everything and be even more transient, agile and organised, he said.
In simple terms, the cyber criminals tricked people into providing enough personal details as to build up a dossier of information that was sufficient to trick someone else into providing them with money, goods or services.
Internet users could expect to see even more legitimate-looking and personalised phishing attacks impersonating banks or other businesses they had accounts with.
Once the bad guys had the details, they bought online using stolen credit-card information, tricking the merchants into providing them with goods or services, Mr Borrett said.
To keep ahead of the computer security industry's efforts to thwart their activities, the bad guys had become quite agile.
"They are using `in the cloud' technologies in far more sophisticated and effective ways than most legitimate businesses."
It was recently discovered that Google's AppEngine had been tapped to act as the master control channel to feed commands to large networks of infected computers in a botnet.
Google shut down the rogue application shortly after being notified.
More of that sort of activity could be expected next year, he said.
"In 2010, we will see the cyber criminals continue to improve the speed with which they are able to move their campaigns from domain to domain, server to server.
"This is partly in response to improved detection and blocking methods deployed in updated security products."
Some of the gangs of thieves had also recently enjoyed success in manipulating the popular online search services.
They were clearly investing more effort in such activities so they could, almost immediately, get search results at or near the top of the first page of results, Mr Borrett said.
Should a celebrity die, an election be fought or some video clip "go viral", the bad guys quickly exploited the blossoming interest in that topic.
The cyber criminals hijacked search results into clicks on links to their malicious web pages.
"This is all a part of the bad guys moving away from 'spray and pray' attacks into more premedicated attacks with specific objectives.
"Expect to see more highly targeted, convincing attacks with custom malware in 2010."
The global economic crisis could have an impact on computer security, he said.
It seemed likely that otherwise decent people facing increasingly desperate economic conditions might be more likely to fall for the quick-money appeal of the Nigerian prince offering 40% of his fortune.
They could also ignore what in better times would be the obvious tell-tale signs of the too-good-to-be-true "work from home" scams favoured by so many cyber criminals to effect their money-laundering schemes.
"Or, as a form of retribution, those who have lost their jobs will take valuable data with them, or details of how to access company resources, and it ends up in the hands of the cyber criminals."
The security threats next year were likely to be nastier than ever, more targeted and more frequent, Mr Borrett said.
With malware and cyber crime now being almost exclusively driven by organised crime running on a business model, changes were largely driven by criminal cost-benefit analysis of opportunities and risks.
The good news was that people did not need to worry if they understood the nature and purpose of the threats, could see through the scams, had good internet security on their computers and kept all of their software up-to-date, he said.
