There’s not much to laugh about when it comes to identity theft, but this might give you a giggle. In a great case of “serves them right,” wannabe hackers around the world are getting a tough lesson in the laws of the jungle.

A hacking group from Morocco going by the handle “Mr. Brain” has jumped into the growing market for hacking and phishing kits with an irresistible offer to help it get noticed by "customers." It’s offering its kits for free. But there’s a nasty twist. The kit is designed to send stolen information back to Mr. Brain and not to the hackers who buy the kit.

Phishing kits are a real pain for the security industry because they make it easy for relative novices to set up complex identify theft scams, in a matter of hours and often for less than a few hundred dollars.

The kits are sold in underground forums and often include everything needed to build every element of a scam, including templates to mass mail spam to victims, the code that will be installed on victim computers to steal information and pass it to the thief, and even instant web sites designed to look like the sites of well known banks and other brands.

If successful they can produce returns thousands of times greater than the initial investment.

It’s a great scam for Mr. Brain, which is why he probably got his name. The wannabes do all the work and take all the risk, but Mr. Brain gets all the reward. Unfortunately the real victims are folks like you and me, whose private data is an easy target for anyone with just basic tools and even half a brain.