Lurking online, a Web rife with ‘evil purposes’
It can be an e-mail from the widow of a recently deceased Nigerian prince asking for your help in disposing of $5 million.
It can be a message from your bank stating that it needs some personal information so that it can update your account.
Or it can be a seller on eBay who’s offering supposedly authentic Tiffany & Co. jewelry at unbelievable prices.
These are prime examples of the online fraud that seemingly lurks behind every unexpected e-mail and many Web sites and that experts say has grown more prevalent in recent years.
“Whenever you have a new technology, at some point there are going to be people who are going to employ that technology for evil purposes,” said Jeffrey J. McConnell, a Canisius College computer scientist.
The fraudsters, scammers and phishers — more on that later — who populate the online world are part of the downside that comes with the rapid growth of the Internet in recent years.
It’s a serious issue, with computer security experts saying that there are millions of victims worldwide who have lost billions of dollars to online fraud. There were more than 1,700 in one year in the Buffalo Niagara region, federal data shows.
The Internet didn’t create this problem, which is really a shift by criminals to the Web because that’s where people live their lives and conduct their business today, experts say.
“The effect of the Internet is to make it much cheaper for scammers to send out solicitations. This means that scams that formerly were unprofitable because the response rate was so low are now profitable,” Eric Rescorla, chief scientist at Network Resonance and an adviser for Voltage Security, said in an e-mail interview Thursday.
This online fraud relies on, and in turn threatens, the trust that is needed for any online transaction and that is the basic underpinning of Web commerce.
Sophisticated intrusions
But there are basic, common-sense steps computer users should take, and consumer advocates are making a new push to promote online safety.
“There’s a lot of really good tips and information out there that, if you follow them, you can protect yourself” from Internet fraud, said Tracy Shelton, a consumer attorney for the New York Public Interest Research Group, which recently held a news conference to that end.
The federal Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that it referred more than 90,000 cases of online fraud to law enforcement agencies in 2007.
Those victims reported losing $239 million, the center said.
A Consumer Reports survey estimated that victims of viruses, spyware and phishing lost $8.5 billion in 2008.
The Federal Trade Commission does not yet have updated figures for the year just ended, but in 2007, a total of 1,709 people from the Buffalo Niagara region told the FTC they were victims of online fraud.
“It’s one of the top consumer complaints,” said Chuck Bell, programs director for Consumer Reports Web- Watch.
Before the Internet was developed, scammers and con artists relied on letters, phone calls and face-to-face encounters to reach victims.
Those were the means of communication at the time, so that’s where scammers went, and that’s why so many criminals have moved to the Web and e-mail in recent years.
The scammers try to get users to give them money or the kind of personal information — Social Security numbers, passwords and the like — that would grant them online access to the victims’ financial accounts. The latter is known as phishing.
The come-ons they use are becoming more highly developed, with e-mails that appear to come from a legitimate business and that link to official- looking Web sites, Bell said.
Malware, including spyware, in which unsuspecting users open an attachment that gives malicious and damaging software access to their hard drive, is on the rise.
In addition, sites such as eBay, Amazon and craigslist that host transactions between two strangers also have become outlets for scams, as consumer advocates report an increase in online auction fraud.
More caution is urged
It’s hard to know whether you can trust the person on the other side of the ad, because someone online cannot rely on the verbal or physical cues you would have in an in-person exchange.
The system of online commerce could not function if buyers didn’t trust the person behind the craigslist ad, the eBay listing or the Web site that lets you book a flight.
And people are naturally trusting, which can be a problem, McConnell said.
A lot of online fraud starts with a personal contact from the scammer, who carefully grooms and manipulates the victim over time, he said.
Users have to be more cautious and treat someone they talk to online the same way they would treat someone in real life. “Many of these scams work because users are insufficiently skeptical of e-mail they receive via the Internet. If users are a little more worried and it causes them to be more careful about trusting e-mail, that’s a good thing,” Rescorla said.
Even though it can be hard to tell if an e-mail or a link to a Web site is legitimate, there are some basic rules to follow, said Bell, who was one of several people who put together a recent news conference in Albany promoting smart online behavior.
The advice from Bell and others includes:
• Don’t open e-mails that you’re not expecting or in cases where you don’t know the person who sent them to you. This especially applies to e-mail attachments.
• Make sure that you have anti-spyware software and that it is activated and updated regularly. There are good free programs, such as AVG and Ad- Aware.
• If you get an e-mail claiming to be from your bank, but you’re not sure if it is, don’t open any link in the e-mail. Instead, Google the name of your bank, pull up the link to their official Web site and enter any information there. And bookmark the Web sites for your financial institutions and provide information only through those links.
• When ordering a product online, check that the page where you enter your credit card and other information begins with the phrase “https://,” an indication that the site is secure.
Further, if you believe you were a victim of online fraud, consumer groups urge that you report it to the Federal Trade Commission or the state attorney general’s office.
A lot of the advice is not highly technical, and that’s something to keep in mind the next time you get an e-mail stating you’ve won the lottery.
“The same common sense you’d use offline,” McConnell said, “needs to be applied online.”
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