You will be targeted by fraudsters and conmen whether you live in London, Paris, Spain or Barbados. You may get conned when you holiday in Turkey, Thailand or Majorca. Scammers will target you regardless of age, sex or colour. The simple fact is that criminals do not discriminate.

They have no morals, no scruples, no hearts. All they want is your money, your valuables or your personal data at any price.

So it is vital you understand how these heartless criminals operate so that you can take steps to safeguard yourself and your family and keep your bank balance and identity intact.

In 2009 the Metropolitan Police shut down 1,200 bogus websites selling fake products. In 2012, during the run-up to Christmas, they closed 2,000 sites on evidence provide by domain name registrar Nominet. That blitz will continue in 2013, but it doesn't mean you are safe.

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The voice on the line is distant and echoing, the words read awkwardly from a script: "Hello, I'm calling from Microsoft and there is a problem with your computer."

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I've long held that it's best to keep a written list of passwords that can be safely locked away when not in use. Very safely in may case as anyone who has to listen to me fighting with my desk drawer every morning will testify. The trouble is that now I've just got too many password for this to work.

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It's become clear that some details of Dropbox accounts have been stolen and the owners have been receiving spam email. Dropbox has admitted this breach on their blog and promised some new security measures coming soon, including two factor authentication. In the mean time it's a good idea to change your Dropbox password, just to be on the safe side. Luckily this is simple to do, even if you access Dropbox from several computers, as I do.

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One of the frustrations with the Android phone that I share with my wife is getting notifications of Facebook updates and emails telling me about those same updates. I tried disabling Facebook notifications but that didn't really work. I was resigned to just clearing the notifications every so often. Then an update for the Facebook app appeared; before installing it I read through the permissions and as a result promptly disabled the app.

It's not that I distrust Facebook, but the app wants an awful lot of control over my phone. Click on the Read more link for full details but suffice it to say that I just copied and pasted the full list from the Google Play website. I'd have spent all afternoon writing them out otherwise.

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For their convenience, password managers such as LastPass and Keepass are very useful. You can use secure passwords and not have to worry about getting locked out when by getting them wrong. There is a cost to this, which is that you'll be lost if you find yourself on a strange computer. I've found that I've been able to learn even some fairly complicated passwords by entering them by hand day after day.

And it doesn't just apply to passwords, what about mobile phone numbers? Jerome K Jerome wrote that it was a rare man who could remember what his wife was wearing the day before but how many of us can remember the mobile numbers of our significant others?

Ever since I was unable to contact my wife because her number was in a phone with a dead battery and non standard charger, I've entered it by hand. Granted I only do this with her number but it does at least mean that I don't have to rely on a battery to contact her. Well apart from the time I got her number wrong as I was about to get into a taxi in Berlin at 11.30pm but the less said about that the better.

So I'm not suggesting that you try and learn every password, just the essentials. You might thank me if your battery runs out.