Internet fraud seems to be as old as the World Wide Web itself. With the natural tendency of some human beings to take advantage of their fellow human beings, it is not surprising that a lot of people resort to desperate but profitable schemes over the Web.
These days, we already know more about these scams. A person who is well-knowledgeable about their tactics won't be tricked to giving away his/her credit card number just that easily. I don't have any statistic to back up my hypothesis, but I am quite sure that most people who are tricked by these scammers are those who do not know much about Internet fraud.
And so we intend to back you up with the information that you have to know. There are so many fraud types all over the Web, but for now let us talk about the most common and most dangerous types:
- Phishing. This is probably number 1 on anybody's lists. In these scheme, the frauds typically send spam mails to a list of email addresses in order to lure them to visit an official-looking website that was just made up by the frauds. They do this in order to get sensitive financial information from you and typically accomplish this by warning you of severe consequences once you do not log-in immediately.
- Illegal Offers. Aside from phishing, another type of email fraud are illegal offers. In this setup, the sender of the email tells you that he/she has an offer that you cannot resist, usually popular goods or services that will be sold at discounted prices. Once your credit card or bank information is supplied, they do not respond anymore.
- Nigeria Email Scams. Ah. This must be one of the classical email scams that you can encounter. It was called such because the first emails of this kind were supposedly sent from some royal person from Nigeria. In these kind of email scam, the sender asks you for help, usually asking the receiver to hold money in the latter's bank account before the sender retrieves it. In truth, the receiver's bank information are just taken and used for further illegal activities.
Always be vigilant. Never share your banking information. Don't just click on the links that you see in your email. These people are already experts at their craft. You have to be smarter than that.
