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Introduction
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Theft and frauds over the Internet and e-mail
unfortunately became part of everydays life. Sure you have heard some
of expressions such as phishing e-mail, e-mail scamming, web forgery,
e-mail fraud...
In a few words, it all comes to this: somebody wants to steal the money
from your account through fraudulent websites or pathetic e-mails.
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How to protect yourself from Internet fraud?
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Learn how to distinguish real from the false e-mail?
How to protect yourself from online fraud?
As always, the best way of protection is to gain knowledge and use
intelligence. If you encounter any suspicious web page or get a
suspicious e-mail, explore them carefuly and if you are not absolutely
sure check it out with somebody who knows. If you do not know such
person, please contact me or call your Internet provider.
Usually the easiest way of recognizing fraudulent site is a link. I
recently received one such false e-mail (pictures are below the
phishing e-mail) where the link immediately showed it was false one.
Link which was necessary to click on was camouflaged, of course.
Camouflaged link is a link that is not the real one, but leads to the
certain site. For example it says "Dispute Transaction" so that you do
not see the real link. When you click on it, it takes you to a page
that is false, and it looks like the original site, but it is not, for
example http://www.paypal.com/ but http://www.greg.co.kr/www.paypal.com/webscr.php?cmd=_login-run.
If you would open that page, it would look identicaly like pay pal
site, but with giving your detailed information, your money would be
stolen by a third person.
Technical protection method is to use a secure Web browser and
e-mail client, that's almost any other but Internet Explorer. Some of
the browsers that are much more safe and better quality then IE are: Mozilla
Firefox, Opera, Mozilla
SeaMonkey. Firefox is currently the most popular and has a lot of plugins that can make your life easier.
High quality and popular e-mail client is Mozilla
Thunderbird.
Internet Explorer and Outlook Express mail client are full of low-grade
safety failures. Do not worry when you install Thunderbird, you can
save all your e-mails from Outlook Express. More about the programs can
be found at the site Recommendations.
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Phishing e-mail:
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Phishing e-mail, as his name alone says, means trying to come upon careless people to get their credit card details.
There are varieties of text contence, but they all have the same two
things in common; it is about making a fake account, for example
Amazon.Com, Apple.Com or another company where you need to verify the
purchase through a web form that appears on fake and not the actual,
right address, or in a message stands that you need to update your
password for a site such as Amazon.Com, Apple.Com and when you do it,
someone else gets details of your account and starts buying while you
are getting the bills to pay.
Below are images from spam e-mail I received from "paypal.com".
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
After signing up (automatically enabled in the Thunderbird mail client)
site has been blocked so that someone wouldn't get scammed. In the URL
field and on the picture can be seen such false link. |
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Ticklish e-mails
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Another method of fraud are ticklish e-mails, like from the "son of
a former king", out of some African country where his father has been
killed, so he emigrated. Now he needs help to transfer money. If you
help him, he will grant you with thousands of dollars.
In fact,
he will be asking you some money that he needs to perform transactions
and if you take part in it, you can forget your money. Likewise, there
are various ticklish e-mails full of sad stories in which people seek
financial assistance, or e-mails in which you must send €10 and forward
e-mail to everybody from your addressbook, then probably by the
principle of good karma, all those people will send you money back :- )
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Fraudulent internet company
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This method of fraud is similar to e-mail phishing. You will receive
e-mail that says a company is selling something, usually software by
significantly cheaper prices.
When you go to their page, it's going to look like some ordinary company, only the products will be 70% cheaper.
Realistically, it is possible that someone sells product 20-30% cheaper, but not 70% or more.
When buy from them, most likely you will not receive anything, or in best case seared cd.
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