Tales of the City Author Armisted Maupin once exclaimed his being "acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today's world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers."
And yes, he had surely made a firm point regarding the prevalence of fraud because of the possibilities given by the internet, and the sad thing is, he is right. The world wide web has indeed paved the way for various people - of different race, color, religion, and other old barriers of humanity - to converge in one mode of communication. It's an invention made for a noble cause - to break the walls of distance all over the world in the name of transnational correspondence. But evil, going about its ancient business, goes and pervert this medium and transformed it into an avenue for transnational fraud practices instead.
Internet fraud had grown and evolved through years of trial-success, trial-failure experimental methods. Scams are the most widespread internet fraud today. Maybe you have tasted your own dose of scam e-mails even since there was still Netscape and Yahoo was today's Google.
For a significant number of years, scams had been limited to e-mails. Now, there are banner ads that can even perpetrate your surfing time and pop out out of the blue to tell you about how you won $1,345,000.00 in a lottery contest that you have not even heard about, much less joined.
Deceptive internet practices are getting more and more sophisticated. Add to that their uncanny ability to obtain information or hoard e-mails. And the bad news is, unfortunately, they are getting better at what they do. The best thing we can do for our part, is to stay informed. If they are finding better ways to disguise themselves and trick us, we just have to be at par in terms of information gathering and cracking thier disguises.
They are using the internet to their advantage, but with viral information sharing, the thing they consider as their pedestal will also be their downfall.
And yes, he had surely made a firm point regarding the prevalence of fraud because of the possibilities given by the internet, and the sad thing is, he is right. The world wide web has indeed paved the way for various people - of different race, color, religion, and other old barriers of humanity - to converge in one mode of communication. It's an invention made for a noble cause - to break the walls of distance all over the world in the name of transnational correspondence. But evil, going about its ancient business, goes and pervert this medium and transformed it into an avenue for transnational fraud practices instead.
Internet fraud had grown and evolved through years of trial-success, trial-failure experimental methods. Scams are the most widespread internet fraud today. Maybe you have tasted your own dose of scam e-mails even since there was still Netscape and Yahoo was today's Google.
For a significant number of years, scams had been limited to e-mails. Now, there are banner ads that can even perpetrate your surfing time and pop out out of the blue to tell you about how you won $1,345,000.00 in a lottery contest that you have not even heard about, much less joined.
Deceptive internet practices are getting more and more sophisticated. Add to that their uncanny ability to obtain information or hoard e-mails. And the bad news is, unfortunately, they are getting better at what they do. The best thing we can do for our part, is to stay informed. If they are finding better ways to disguise themselves and trick us, we just have to be at par in terms of information gathering and cracking thier disguises.
They are using the internet to their advantage, but with viral information sharing, the thing they consider as their pedestal will also be their downfall.