All around the web there are scammers waiting patiently for you to make a mistake and give them just about any information they can use against you. There are scams that involve losing just a little amount of money to big and dangerous ones like identity theft where you can be linked to criminal activities.
Staying safe on the web is not that difficult, but you must know what you should be careful of. Here, we will show you some of the most common scams and how you can successfully avoid them.
Social Engineering
The first thing you should know is that a lot of scammers use social engineering to get your information. This means that they use psychological manipulation to convince you to give them access to your personal life, passwords or some other information they can use to take advantage of you. According to bestantivirus.com social engineering is a threat, because people can be fooled in a lot of ways. Hackers can send attacks from different fronts to deceive you and get everything they need to access your personal and/or private information, and just as security keeps evolving, so does their methods.
Phishing
Phishing is one of the most common scams. It is consider a cybercrime that consists of hackers fooling people by mail, text, telephone and sometimes by pretending to be institutions, asking people to hand them personal information or passwords that can affect their bank accounts and sometimes even giving them full control of their finances.
Spear phishing
This is a more advanced way of phishing where the hacker will send you personalized information that seems tailored for you, looking like it comes from reliable sources like banks, institutions and even close relatives. In this kind of phishing, they already know you based on your online presence and can use it to their advantage.
Nigerian Prince Scam
This is a scam that has been running since the 90’s (the FBI even has a code for it, 419), but it’s evolved with time. The premise is that you receive an email from a nigerian prince offering you a really good business deal, you just need to send a small amount of money to start the business and then you’ll get rich fast. The truth is, those scams ask your for a small amount of money so they can keep it and you never know about them.
It might sound really outdated, but as we’ve said before, these scams evolve. Right now there are a lot of people donating to different social causes, but that means that there are a lot of scammers sending false websites that appear to be legitimate NGO’s asking for donations, just to steal small amounts of money from thousands of people.
Carding
When someone manages to do phishing right, they can even have access to your credit card information and then you have a carding problems. There are criminals that can max out your credit card, and there are others that can use it to buy things that you won’t notice on your account statement or will seem as really little transactions so you won’t think anything about them (like strange rides on Uber).
Bottom Line
Internet scams are as old as the internet and won’t disappear soon, so you must keep informed on which new scams are coming, but remember that prevention is being one step ahead from criminals. Being that you use an antivirus to detect them or that you avoid any suspicious website, just remember that if an online deal seems to good to be true, it’s not real.
