The Met Police can feel justifiably proud of themselves, with an investigation leading to the jailing for many years of a pair of criminals who attacked computers with malware to steal £3 million from UK bank accounts.

Excellent news; high-fives to everyone involved. However, the force’s communications team slightly tarnished the win with some rather confusing advice on internet security.

It’s easy to forget that online security can be confusing for people who don’t spend all day reading about it. Odd jargon such as phishing and trojans, and shrill warnings from security firms don’t help matters, so the Met’s Police Central E-Crime Unit (PCeU) — the UK’s experts on such matters — has offered some tips to help.

Some of the advice is perfectly fine: keep OSes up to date, use antivirus software, consider installing a firewall, and think before you download.

Other tips it offered are rather confusing — and gathered bewildered laughs from the PC Pro team.

The PCeU statement advises:

“Disconnect your computer from the internet when you’re not using it.”

This one raised some eyebrows. By all means switch the PC off when you’re not using it, but disconnecting it from the internet seems a little extreme. Of course, the best way to avoid infection is to leave your PC in the box, but we’re not going to do that (it makes it hard to type).

“Run full disk scans periodically, which will help prevent malicious programs from reaching your computer.”

Err… what? How does scanning the computer prevent malware from reaching your computer? Doesn’t that mean it’s there already?

“Avoid opening attachments or following links in emails and on websites.”

It’s certainly good advice to not download attachments from unknown senders or click shortened links from untrusted sources, but if we never clicked a link again, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s web would be rendered rather useless.

While the finer points of online security are complicated, keeping yourself generally safe on the web is common sense. But it’s hard enough to sift through the hyperbole coming out of some security firms and even the Government, without adding confusing advice from the experts at the PCeU to the mix, too.

It isn’t totally new – Londoners can check their borough already at the Met Police website. And a quick look at the figures shows that – despite the media giving the impression we’re entering a new Wild West of guns and knives – crime in London has been on the decline for several years now.

At the time of writing, gun-enabled crime is down 11.5% on last year; violence against the person has dropped 4.8%; murders fell by 1.9% in the last 12 months and robberies are down a massive 19%.

But according to the papers it’s crime “hot-spots” that are the problem, so a plan like these online crime maps is the ideal way to highlight it, right? Wrong, and to illustrate why, I give you an example of an existing online crime mapping scheme:

The LCPD crime “Blotter” (click to enlarge).

Before you attack me with the blindingly obvious, I know it’s not real.

The LCPD Blotter details the daily crime stats for Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto IV’s fictional locale. And, as any idiot could confidently predict, its list of “no go areas” acts entirely as a magnet for wannabe digital criminals – whether as a challenge to single-handedly lift the crime level in a listed safe area, or simply be a part of it in a known hot-spot.

Now, I’m not suggesting the real-world maps will be so stupid as to list such glorifying top-twenty charts of “no go areas” (we hope), but is it so far-fetched to imagine the statistics on easily accessible online crime maps becoming status symbols?

Will we see gangs of youths navigating to “no go” streets on their 3G iPhones to take on the current occupants for the turf? Or challenging rivals to be the street with the most knife attacks, robberies, even murders, in a month?

Could we even see flashmob-style events? A whole borough’s gang members co-ordinate online and aim to hit a target number of crimes in a week. A day. An hour. Or even a daily ratcheting of the crime total over a week – every day more crimes than the last.

With a publicly viewable achievements sheet for gangs, it’s almost as though these crimes are legitimised by statistics; a terrible merger of computer game ‘objectives’ and real-life misery. The incentive for some to prove themselves may be too great to resist.

I know, I know, I’m sure the PM knows more about this than the rest of us; I’m sure none of all that will happen and crime will start declining quicker than Internet Explorer and the French national team.

But if it all goes wrong and crime starts rising, you know it won’t be the PM who shoulders the blame. It’ll be poor old Grand Theft Auto as usual.