Internet scams are everywhere

The use of the Internet has grown explosively in the last five years, and many people now spend at least some time every day using the Web for business, shopping or just the exchange of e-mail. With this growth of the Internet as a useful tool, criminals have taken the opportunity to use the Web for theft. It is a rare day when an e-mail user fails to find a message from someone representing some sort of fraud, be it a phishing attack designed to fool the user into giving up personal information or out and out fraud designed to get the user to part with money. As time goes on, the problem will only get worse, as the criminals seem to find new ways to circumvent all attempts to thwart them.

Here is a list of the most common scams facing users of the Internet today:

Nigerian e-mail scam. This one is already legendary, and it is so well known that one would think that no one would fall for it anymore. A message arrives in your inbox from someone claiming to be a relative of someone who was a high ranking official in the Nigerian government. That person has been deposed and needs assistance in removing millions of dollars in funds from the country. All they ask in exchange for sharing 10% of the money is the use of your bank account. Oh, and they will need some money to help facilitate the transfer, so if you could send $1000 or so, that would help. If you are lucky, all you will lose is the money you send to them. If you aren’t so lucky, you could lose the money in your bank account, as well. There are variations on this one; we recently saw a message to the same effect purporting to be from “Mrs. Yasser Afafat.” It’s hard to believe that people would actually respond to requests for money from strangers, but greed takes over and people actually participate in these scams.

Phishing Scams - This is a relatively new scam that involves sending e-mail messages that appear to be from a financial institution, such as Wells Fargo, Citibank, PayPal or even Ebay. The message looks official and warns that due to “security violations” your account may soon be canceled. In order to “verify” your identity, you are asked to follow a link and fill out a form with your personal information. If you click the link, you will be taken to a site that looks like the official site of the company mentioned. But if you fill out the form, the thieves will have successfully stolen your username, password and/or credit card information. This one is easy to avoid. Your bank is never going to e-mail you for your password. Your bank already knows your password. Just ignore these messages. If in doubt, call the institution and ask if the messages are legitimate.

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