subject: Beware & Be Aware Of Internet Scams by:Francis Regan [print this page] Internet has many advantagesInternet has many advantages. It provides mankind all the information he needs right from the dust to the boundless sky. It has brought mankind together, which helped eliminating distances between people of various cultures and tradition. It also has its own drawbacks especially, security. People over the ages have been trying to stop these issues but none are successful as of now. Many articles, blogs, posts have been written are written about these issues but still there has been no change and we still hear many of these fraudulent issues and scams.
Recently, my friend received an email statement from the ICICI Bank for the month of March. He was shocked to see that his entire balance has been drained out in online shopping. He immediately reported this incident to the bank officials and cyber crime police. They were able to trace all his transactions but they could not find the criminals who did this. However, the money which he had saved for his future was all lost. Later he realized that he gave the card information to a fraudulent ICICI website.
Online banking has many advantages, like where we don't have to visit the bank for every single transaction. As we know, all good things have a drawback; online banking also has few negative points which we have to be really careful about. The most efficient way of avoiding all these negatives is by being aware of what is happening currently in the Internet. People, who are banking online, are most likely to be caught through online spamming. These online spamming websites create duplicate websites that looks exactly like the real one. As soon as you try to login to the website, an automatic software stores all the information which you enter in the fake website.
I would also like to narrate another incident in one of the most popular social networking site during the year 2008-2009. My girlfriend's account got hacked. I thought that it was merely impossible to penetrate Google's defenses, but nothing seemed impossible. Though there was no damage to property, but it took a lot of effort. She had to call up the Google customer care and give them a photo identity of the card in order to remove the account permanently.
Numerous incidents have taken place largely these days. Even I was into such miserable situation once. I used to play online gaming through a famous online portal called Garena. I had really good points and my score was really good. One day when I tried to login as usual, I was not able to enter in. I had to send an email to the system administrator stating that my account got hacked and please reset the password.
There was a famous attack once which made several banks to pay heavy prices to its customers. It's called as the Phishing attack. This method of attack was extremely famous during the year 2005-2006. Many banks including ICICI and Citibank had to pay its customers for their losses. What good does it do for a customer who has wasted his valuable time with the bank fighting to get back their money?
Recently I received an email from a person named Jew Andrews from South Africa. He stated in the mail that I have won a lottery of 5,000,000 dollars and I have to wire him five thousand dollars in order to claim my prize money. Further, I researched about these issues in the internet and I found many reviews by people who said that they also received similar emails and it was a total fraud.
Culprits will never change as long as there are people who are ready to fall into their traps. I'm not opposing to online shopping or banking but I'm stressing on the problems which could lead due to online transactions. It is very vital to know that we consumers must be aware of the scams and fraudulent that happen over the internet and help each other to keep these scammers and hackers at bay.
About the author
Consumer Daddy is trying to fight against all these scams that are happening in the market. Know what you do before you do!!
