Search all you like in your world atlas and you will not find the Republic of Port Maria. But it did have its own website, where it offered offshore banking services.

This virtual existence might have continued indefinitely if the creators of the mythical country had not over-reached themselves.

A banking member of the ICC Commercial Crime Bureau was horrified to discover that the Republic had set up a hyperlink from its 'official site' to his bank's own legitimate website.

This and other hyperlinks to highly respectable financial sites were presumably designed to add credibility to the Republic of Port Maria.

Concerned at the damage the link could do to its reputation, the bank asked CCB to put its Seek and Desist service to work. CCB quickly established that the ISP hosting the site belonged to a major United States television network, which was renting out web space at $8.95 a month.

The TV network agreed that the site violated its terms of service agreement and removed it instantly, bring the virtual existence of the Republic of Port Maria to an abrupt end.

Difficult though it is to imagine that the average punter could be taken in by such a bizarre scam, all the evidence is that Internet frauds are growing exponentially. In the past, documentary fraudsters were bound by the physical limits imposed by paper. Today they can reach infinite numbers of potential victims over the Internet.

Attempting to give the fraudulent pitch spurious reliability by linking it to a respected institution is a technique as old as fraud itself - and the only surprise is how often it works.

Jon Merrett, Assistant Director of CCB, said: "We should not ignore the potential of fraudulent sites to undermine public trust in the banking, finance and insurance companies they claim to be associated with.

"Whenever one of these cases comes to our attention, we make great efforts to alert those who may be affected and offer to remedy the situation. But this kind of deception will continue until ISPs start to take more responsibility for policing their networks and take steps to guard against hosting websites without first checking out the credentials of their customers."