Internet fraud refers to the use of Internet services to present fraudulent solicitations to prospective victims, to conduct fraudulent transactions, or to transmit the proceeds of fraud to financial institutions or to others connected with the scheme. Internet fraud can occur in chat rooms, email, message boards or on websites.
Who really are the perpetrators?
Usually these computer attacks are done by people called crackers who break into computer systems illegally. Cracking a computer system lately became more of an activity with criminal intent.
Fraud nowadays is everywhere primarily because of the internet. Aside from crackers, there are other malicious individuals who steal money and information. They are the ones responsible for acts such as phishing, spamming, identity theft, and the so called intellectual property theft. They normally enlist the services of crackers when engaging in such activities.
Other criminals simply prey on anyone looking for a way to make money online, disguising themselves offering employment or any form of small online business.
Is your credit card information safe?
The most noted modes of committing fraud on the Internet are phishing and identity theft. The later is the systematic attempt to gain some personal information. These perpetrators copy the information from another person's credit card and use it in purchasing items from the Internet. Phishing is obtaining sensitive information like passwords, credit card details, PINs through deception. You can found it usually in your emails or instant messages. They normally fool you to submit sensitive personal information.
At times they pose as legal officers of an institution, bank employee or even a private person asking favor from you to transfer their big sum of bank accounts to your end. These form of emails are called spam or unsolicited messages. Avoid such email notification that suggests any kind of financial benefits. Recently, spams do not happen only in emails. You may heard of newsgroup spam, instant message spam and even blog comment spam? Spam messages may also be used for phishing. It contains some form of promoting products and services. These emails normally clogged up inboxes beside getting other people's e-mail addresses purposely for their mailing lists.
How to protect yourself?
The keys to avoid being hit by these malicious attacks are user awareness and due negligence.
- Avoid e-mail attachments that came from unknown sources
- Do not send your personal information to unknown senders, especially your credit card information
- Be aware of certain viruses like Trojan horse that can be obtained through files from peer-to-peer file-sharing services because these viruses can be used to hijack your computer later on
- Regularly update your anti-virus definition files
- A MUST to install a firewall if your PC is hooked online
- Use file encryption to protect your sensitive files
- Do not share your passwords to anyone
- When purchasing or paying bills online, close your web browser and log off your computer to prevent others from retrieving your information
- Do not input your credit card information if you cannot find a VeriSign trust seal normally found below any web pages
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