Identity thieves who claim they stole details of 21 million German bank accounts are offering to sell the data on the black market for €12 million (US$15.3 million), a German magazine reported over the weekend.

To prove they weren’t bluffing, the crooks produced the compact disc containing the names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays account numbers, and bank routing numbers of 1.2 million accounts. Two investigative reporters for WirtschaftsWoche say they obtained the CD during a face-to-face meeting at a hotel in Hamburg with two individuals involved with the theft. The journalists were posing as interested buyers working for a gambling operation.

“We took away with us the first delivery, a CD with 1.2 million accounts, that we couldn’t imagine,” said one of the editors overseeing the investigation. “In the worst case, three out of four German households would have to be afraid that some money could be taken from their checking account without their authorisation, and perhaps even without their realising it,” the magazine stated.

The information was most likely collected from call center employees, the magazine said.

The worsening economy appears to be helping computer crooks with one of their toughest tasks: tricking people into opening their homes and bank accounts and becoming “mules” for laundering money or stolen goods.

The scams themselves aren’t new. They’re pitched in spam e-mails as “work-at-home” jobs that promise excellent part-time money for helping companies pay clients in other countries. The victims are asked to open new bank accounts in their names, agree to accept anonymous payments into those accounts, and forward those payments by way of money transfer, usually to locations in Eastern Europe.

The scam is classic money laundering with an Internet twist. The money is generally real, and the middle man is promised a cut. What those middle men may not know is they’re trafficking in ill-gotten gains and helping criminals pay each other while disguising the source. And the mules are often the ones at the greatest risk of arrest.

Savvy computer users usually identify this as a scam. But security researchers say more people are willing to take a risk on the come-ons as unemployment rises and the volume of the mule e-mails increases.

Microsoft Corp will soon launch a full range of online versions of its software products, including the Office suite, and expects the weak economy to accelerate growth of the nascent Web-based software market, a senior executive said on Monday.

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, is leading the company’s entry into the “software as a service” market, which offers programs that are hosted online instead of downloaded to computer hard drives.

By using the Web to host software like Microsoft Office, as well as Exchange e-mail and SharePoint collaborative software, Microsoft customers do not need to spend as much money on equipment and maintenance of computer servers.

“What we think is in five years, 50 percent of the use of Exchange and Sharepoint could be serviced from the cloud,” Elop told Reuters in an interview.

Apple Inc.’s famous veil of secrecy appears to have stretched thin in trying to cover thousands and thousands of Wal-Mart stores.

A Wal-Mart employee in Uniondale, N.Y., told The Associated Press on Monday that the store will start selling Apple’s iPhone, confirming media reports over the weekend.

The employee, who would not give his name, did not know when the phones would go on sale, and said the store had no merchandise yet. The San Jose Mercury News reported late Friday that store employees in California said the phone would be on sale by the last week of December, and maybe before Christmas.