Online Scam

Imagine, as you browsing around the world looking to buy the new iPhone 6 that had just been released and there’s a pop-up saying “New iPhone 6 for sale! 50% DISCOUNT!!! CLICK HERE TO BUY ONE NOW!!!” Then you click on it and it ask for your credit card info and said that it will be delivered to you by tomorrow. However you waited for a few days but nothing arrive. After that a few days later you found out that someone had been using your identity to buy things online and now your account balance is going down from S$10000 to S$0.

Yup: you are a victim of online scam.

A lot of people is vulnerable to this kind of crime. When this kind of scam happen in a small community, people lost trust. Likewise, a friend of Akanksha Shukla had once been a near victim of a scam. The girl was trying to buy a dog and a stranger email her online and told her that he has a dog to sell. After a conversation online with the man, they agree to meet up at an unconfirmed location at midnight and he demanded around $1000 and their credit card detail. Akanksha’s friend ask her parents and then her parents asked the guy to go to a coffee shop in at noon instead but got no reply. After asking a few people, they figured it was a scam. From the moment they are scam, they would never buy anything online again.

To find out more, the reporter interviewed Adrienne Michetti, Digital Literacy Coach at United World College of South East Asia. “People have different understanding of what that means. There’s marketing which is really clever or unethical like there’s unethical marketing but is that a scam?” she said. “I think there’s some fuzzy line between what is a scam and what is legal marketing that’s just unethical.”. “For example, a scam is where, you know, someone taken your personal private information and use it to take money from your bank account or something like that, whereas legal but unethical marketing might be when you’ve been asked to ‘click here for a free iPad but in order to get the free iPad, you have to send these five other email to your friends’ kind of thing.” she said.

Online scam is one of the biggest security issue, according to Ms. Michetti, everyone is online even the most undeveloped country, people still have mobile technology to get online. According to Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), in 2013, the IC3 receive 262,813 complains from internet users which resulted in the lost of $781,841,611, which is a 48.8% increase in reported losses since 2012 ($581,441,110).

A lot of people had been a victim of online scam, some even died tracking the scammer, according to consumer.ftc.gov. In this 21st century, we can’t afford to lose any money on this kind of scam, we need to take action. The first step to prevent it from happening is to become more knowledgeable yourself, according to Ms. Michetti. You need to know who you’re dealing with. For example, what’s their physical address is? What’s their phone number? If you are contacting a company make sure you know someone in the company that you can contact and know exactly where the company is. You also need to keep track of every purchases that have been made with your credit card, see if someone had been using the credit card to buy anything and if there is a delivery report to somewhere you can easily track the scammer. We also need to identify the circumstances that allow that crime to happen, is it because the security flaw in a software? Is there someone sitting too close to you that they can see your PIN? and find a solution for it. The government should also take action on this issue, according to Ms. Michetti. The government should consider promoting education about the use of technology lower the rate of the crime.

However, if you think you are a victim of online scam,report it to the police immediately so they can track the scammer in time. Found IP. Hacker Jailed.

Written by Sewen