On the topic of email fraud, The Wikipedia says

email fraud relies on naive individuals who put their confidence in get rich-quick schemes such as too good to be true investments or offers to sell popular items at impossibly low prices.

Ironically, a lot of people have lost their life savings due to such frauds.In a series of articles, we are going to look at the  various types of frauds that might be doing the rounds this festive season. Make sure you hang around, if you want your festive season to be full of joy and giving, and not spent in repenting for having fallen for that the irresistible offer.

The holiday season is here and so are the phishing scams! Its time to warn you against this type of scam. During the festive season, the hackers take advantage of your generosity, by sending you christmas cards which look like they are from legitimate charitable organisations.

Be aware, these are not from a charitable organisation. By donating to these people you would not educate a child, make a child happier or some old people feel homely. The bitter truth is these are fake websites which are designed to steal donations, credit card details and identities of the people who are donating. Be cautious now, don’t say that we never warned you!

This is the beginning of a series of articles on the various types of scams that are may be practiced this festive season. Stay around, for there is a lot more to come!

If you are an active Internet user, and use an active email ID, you might already be aware of what I am talking about. An email lottery scam can be broadly described as a malicious mail which informs you that you have won a huge amount of money in a lottery and asks you to deposit a certain percentage of that amount into a remote account, as processing fee. Once you have done this, the sender may ask you to deposit simultaneous fees amounts in different accounts. Post this, you would never hear from the senders. On a lot of occasions, it becomes difficult to trace the offenders, considering that the money is asked to be deposited in an overseas account and scamsters are from abroad.

A case in point would be mumbai internet lottery scam. The recent case in our very own Mumbai is enough to set alarm bells ringing, but you, as a reader of this article can be easily safe by practicing a small series of steps. In this case, the victim, received a mail informing her that she had won a lottery to the tune of millions and asked to deposit “processing fees” repeatedly. Once she did this, the scamster decamped with the money, but were thankfully caught, thanks to the alertness of the police. Here the scamsters were from the same city, which helped solve matters. What if they belonged to some remote location and moved base before the police reached them?
That is where our series of simple steps would come into use. They are broadly given below:

• NEVER treat a mail which claims that you have won a lottery, some large amount of money, with importance. Do NOT open it, considering it might have a worm or a virus which might try to hack into your computer system and steal all your precious data. The same rule applies if someone is claiming to give you a lot of “free downloads” without any fees or verification.
• You can NEVER win a lottery if you haven’t taken part in one. Most mails that come across to you would often claim that you won the lottery through a RANDOM draw of IP addresses or something on these lines. Such claims are NEVER true.The mail which is making you so happy, might also be putting a similar false smile across thousands of other faces worldwide.
• NEVER give out your account number to unidentified senders on the internet. Your bank wouldNEVER ask you for your pin verification OR your account number online through your personal email,because they were the ones who gave it to you in the first place, remember? Someone claimingthat they need your account number to transfer huge amounts of money from someplace to theother is not telling you the truth because such a person DOES NOT have that sum of money. Instead,he or she might have a good mind to empty your account in case you are sweet enough to share youryour account!

I shall share examples of what these emails look like in another of my post. In the meanwhile, the pointers above shall be more than sufficient to keep you safe from most email scam threatsonline. With a little alertness and care, the internet can be a great place to hang out or be used as a treasure trove of knowledge. The ground rule is NEVER TRUST. Don’t lose your sleep over this, just be a little careful.

Stop, Think and click

We take a lot of things for granted in life. There are the obvious things like your car, house, or even your cell phone. Sure if you went a day with out one of those it would be difficult, but what about the Internet? Internet has entered lives of millions of people and effectively transforming their complex tasks into simpler ones. Earlier doing research involves several tiring library trips.

Days are gone when we used to work on 14.4kbps dial up line to open hotmail screen. Telphone line was being used to connect I, but now broadband has changed the scenario. These days we are so used to lighting fast Internet that we get upset when it takes even ten seconds to load page. We are now so used to having all the information in the world at our fingertips that if it were taken away, a lot of people wouldn’t know what to do.

The internet gives you access to information, entertainment, convenience of banking, products and services. but at the same time, it can leave you open to online scams, identity thieves, ers and more.

We will be providing information on various topics like messaging & chat rooms, online scammers, social networking, P2P, Cyber bullying, sexting, e-mail and many more topics.

Learn and keep visiting this blog to keep you updated in the field of broadband & internet.