Image: Wallace Brown Greeting Cards, Boys’ Life, Sept. 1953, p. 5. (Get rich quick scams are much older than the Internet.)
Scroll through some of the previous posts on the Fordham IT Security News blog, and you’ll find all sorts of scams. No doubt you’ve received a few yourself.
Be on the alert. If it’s too good to be true, especially if you have to give away information about yourself or pay money, it’s probably a scam.
Job Scams Cyber criminals post their advertisements on legitimate job sites and often use familiar-looking or convincing company logos, language, and links to fake websites that appear to be those of real organizations.
These sites might charge fees for services that real companies would never render. After you submit your resume and personal information, they might ask you for a $50-$100 fee. Normally, after a few days the thieves close the scam and disappear.
Donation Scams Natural disasters, political campaigns, and global health issues are often the emphasis of donation phishing scams. For instance, recently, cyber criminals have used earthquakes and tsunamis to create illegal “charity” businesses to help the survivors of these events.
Many of these scams begin with an email or a post in an online forum asking for donations in the name of well-known, legitimate charities. When you click a given link, you are taken to a phony website devised to trick you into providing your personal financial information.
Fake E-cards E-cards are made the same way that websites are: they’re built on the Internet, just like this web page. So when you send someone an e-card, you send them a link to click, which takes them to the online greeting card you created for them.
This means an e-card you receive could actually be a phishing scam, spam or a spyware installer, or a computer virus.
Read Microsoft’s helpful pages about more best practices on how to avoid these kinds of scams.
By Nicole Kagan, Fordham IT News Editor
