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Internet fraud is based on trust

Date: April 26, 2005
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: CCRC staff

The Internet is entering into our lives and it seems not so exotic as it did in the past. It is a new tool for usual people and also for so-called virtual con artists. Namely, these con men use the global network that grants opportunities of anonymity to earn profits by means of virtual scams.

The Internet-picklock operates on a psychological factor. People come into the Internet with bright thoughts and ideas; they forget that they are real people. They forget that they can be defrauded by swindlers on the Internet just like in real life.

The fraud is based on trust

Online scammers use the same tricks as their real colleagues. There are online stores where prices are several times lower than in other markets. People are ready to buy and to pay web-money for non-existing merchandise even without checking the data on the supplier. They will wait ad infinitum while their laptops that cost only one hundred dollars is in transit. Con men usually gather some thousands of unlucky people collect $40-50 from each of them and utterly disappear.

It is necessary to be less trusting to strangers haunting your threshold and introducing their selves as representatives of some company. You will certainly be watchful in such situation. The Internet is no exclusion.

The number of users is ever-increasing day by day. Users become more educated. Real scammers of the 80-90s taught a lot of people not to believe in gravy in the street. The same thing will certainly happen on the Internet. The experience will teach users to be more discerning.

It seems that e-scams will not grow in the future. Internet fraud won’t exceed the level of the general statistics of this kind of crimes in our everyday life.

Though in the future, it will be more difficult to find online thieves, despite ways of establishing the IP address to locate swindlers.

In order to protect our homes, we install alarms. In order to protect you on the Internet, you use certain software, additional hardware designed to protect from hacker attacks and information thefts. Therefore one should acknowledge that every lock can be pick-locked, but we can just install a new lock in order to protect us from a new thief. On the Internet, like in real life, there is a certain vicious circle. I can protect myself from a burglar today, but tomorrow he will bring more tools and will break the lock. I will need more security means.

But still, the main tool is the internal “filter” of the user. The user just should not get embarked on shady enterprises in the Internet and fall for a tempting one hundred dollar laptop.


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