Online Scams: Understanding and Addressing a Growing Threat Assessment Answer

Abstract

Online scams have become one of the most significant consumer risks of the 21st century because of the growing Internet use. Online scams have become a huge problem for consumers and businesses alike. They are becoming more sophisticated, and people need to be more cautious. Online scams have become increasingly widespread in the last decade and are one of the most common methods for defrauding individuals worldwide. The financial impact of these scams on organizations has also increased due to fraud in its member's financial services accounts. In the most severe cases, online scams cost the victim millions of dollars annually in damages. In addition, these scams also involve a large number of people who use this technique of communication to get financial benefits. These people commonly refer to as spammers. They are also known as spyware, and these online scams exist to profit from other people's information. These online scammers profit from the data they gather from the Internet, which is then sold or utilized for fraud. Most online scams involve obtaining information from the victim, such as bank or credit card or personal information and then using that information for fraudulent activities. The scammers frequently pretend to be some genuine business or website of the victim and ask for information or something to do with the company.

Summary

Online scams are usually relatively easy to detect. The most common scam involves using fake web pages that imitate a company's website to deceive users and trick them into providing personal or financial information that uses for identity theft or fraud. Different scams, including fraud schemes and con games, can be perpetrated online. You can use several free tools and techniques to help protect yourself against these scams. The scammers themselves make no effort to fool these tools. Some of these techniques involve examining the content of web pages and clicking on links you need help with. Some of the tools make the job of the scammers that much more difficult (Bandiaky et al., 2023). Online scams that come to law enforcement officers or other officials' attention can classify into one of two categories. The first is fraud committed by people with access to computers and the Internet to make money by scamming people unfamiliar with the Internet. The second is fraud perpetrated by people who try to steal information about online users to commit identity theft.

Online scams that cause significant financial losses to users and carry out by Internet service providers can also be considered fraud. For many years, criminals have used computers to perpetrate various frauds. Most of these crimes have traditionally taken place in person, but online fraud has increased as criminals have come to rely more on the Internet. This type of fraud involves deceiving people to get them to send out confidential information. Most of the time, a person sends this information by email (Coluccia et al., 2020).

Introduction

Online scam artists can then make up their websites to resemble legitimate ones to steal money or identity information from people who would not usually visit them. In some cases, these scams can carry out without physical access to the computer of the person deceive, a process known as phishing. Phishing is a reasonably new crime that can commit using computers. Other online scams involve computer viruses, programs designed to execute on a user's computer and usually have a destructive or malicious impact. The most common type of virus is the so-called Trojan virus (Dong et al., 2023). A Trojan virus typically design to gather information or carry out other evil acts. It usually has some rootkit software that hides the virus on the victim's computer, making it more difficult for the user to remove or disable it (Wen et al., 2023).

Online scams are usually only detected after they have succeeded and the victim is incurring damage because they typically do not use the classic physical components of a con game (i.e., physical contact between the perpetrators and the victim). Most online scams perpetrate through so-called phishing attacks. The attacker can intercept the user's login credentials when the victim logs into the compromised website. One common scam is an online employment scam. In such a scam, an individual is promised a job at a company without experience and must provide high security-related personal information. Upon arrival, however, the person will discover that there is no job to find (Kim et al., 2023).

Often, victims of online fraud offer the chance to earn money in exchange for giving the scammers their credit card details, social security numbers, or banking information. In such cases, the scammers might offer a seemingly legitimate opportunity for someone to earn money working from home. However, the person will ask to perform something for a customer. Most of the time, the work offered will not pay for, and the customer will ask to pay a fee to do the job. After some time, the scammer might ask the person to pay additional fees and to work on a project that is only worth a few cents. At this point, the victim will scam, and the scammer will be free of having to pay the person for the work they have performed (Dhawan et al., 2019).

Statistics on the incidence and frequency of online scams and cybercrime are notoriously difficult to collect and estimate due to a lack of accurate data on the number of victims. Statistics on the incidence of online scams and cybercrime often rely on public databases, such as online scam lists. These lists include the most common types of scams, primarily determined by the amount of feedback and media coverage they receive. Cons are listed based on the frequency with which they report and the nature of the scam itself. Although online scam lists help better understand the scope of online scams, they are based on public feedback and may or may not reflect reality. The accuracy of the statistics also relies on the credibility and objectivity of the organization that collects the data, which remains a concern for many experts (Bandiaky et al., 2023).

Discussion

Online scams target people in many ways, including phishing, romance, and online dating scams. These scams often target the internet savvy, including individuals with a high level of computer literacy. The increasing number of new online scam listings on public scam databases indicates the continued increase in incidents and the increased vulnerability of people worldwide. Online scams use a variety of methodologies to deceive and defraud their victims (Coluccia et al., 2020).

Some of the most common techniques used by scammers include:

Keystroke loggers

Scammers hide a keylogger virus or program that silently logs all your keystrokes and sends them to their server. Scammers will then use this information to gain access to online accounts.

Hijacking websites

A hijacker program redirects the victim to a spoofed site that looks like the real one. These fake sites are built to look identical to the real ones (Bandiaky et al., 2023). So, the victim is tricked into thinking that they are on the actual location when they are on a malicious site. The scammers then collect sensitive information from the victim, like their login credentials or credit card numbers.

Malvertising

Malvertising is when ad or search pop-ups are displayed on top of legitimate websites (Kim et al., 2023). These ads lead users to malicious sites that collect sensitive information, such as login credentials and credit card details.

Scamming

A scam is any scheme that attempts to obtain something for nothing. Scammers often use the Internet to deceive, con, and manipulate people into believing they have something to gain (Dong et al., 2023). Scammers may offer an inferior product for free, ask for money upfront for a supposedly discounted product, make a fraudulent claim, or ask their victim to download malware, install malicious apps, download pirated material, or give up sensitive information (Wen et al., 2023).

Results

Online scams are a growing concern for online users due to the risk of falling victim to identity theft, hacking, or credit card fraud. Due to the rise of online scams, the FBI has created the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) to help track and report online scams to law enforcement and the FBI. With a dedicated reporting system, the IC3 ensures that scammers receive the appropriate punishments. Online scams have also taken more dramatic forms, including the case of the Tiffany scam, in which con artists tricked thousands of individuals into buying fake diamonds in exchange for gifts or money. The scammers have successfully used several celebrity endorsements in the past few years (Dong et al., 2023).

The following are online scams that are popular right now, along with tips to help consumers protect themselves from these and other online scams.

The most common and easiest method of online scams is fake shopping sites. With this type of fraud, an online scammer will create a website that appears to be a legitimate online shopping website, complete with logos, products, and price tags. The scammer will set up a PayPal account that they can also control. When a user clicks on a link to this website, he will be asked to enter payment information (Dhawan et al., 2019). Once the user has given this information, they will be redirected to the PayPal website, where they will be asked to provide more money to the fraudster to complete the transaction. This fraud occurs because users trust these sites when entering their payment information.

Another method of online scams is emails spam. The email messages that are used in spam scams are made to look like they were sent from a legitimate business or organization. However, they contain malicious code which will attempt to download a virus onto the victim's computer. It will start the computer hacking them and using the computer to download more viruses and collect data on the user. The next type of online scam is phishing. It is when someone contacts the victim through an email or other communication (Dong et al., 2023). Fraud is usually very successful because of the email address and the information obtained through the phishing scam. Lastly, identity theft is a growing problem. The scammer will either get the individual's statement by asking the user to divulge it, or they will use the information they have gained in other ways, such as stealing financial data. Identity theft usually occurs with online transactions, such as when a user is asked to send money to the scammer's bank account or when they are asked to fill out a form attached to a purchased package (Kim et al., 2023).

Conclusion

In conclusion, online scams are a complex and ongoing challenge, and there is a need for continued research and development of new and innovative solutions to address this problem. It is also critical to recognize that these scam attempts are not all created equal, and some may be more sophisticated, convincing, and harder to detect than others. Scam awareness and an open conversation with others will help limit your exposure to online fraud. As with all online scams, the direct impact of phishing, spam email, and virus scams is that the victim's computer becomes infected with malicious software or hardware (Coluccia et al., 2020). Users are also frequently exposed to pop-up messages that often display along with online content. These pop-up ads may trick the user into performing actions or downloading software or hardware. The worst pop-up ads are pop-under ads, in which a page's content pops up after a user has clicked on a link in a website's text or graphic content. Suppose a victim is involved in a computer compromise or is the victim of an online scam. This primary response team responsible for developing and disseminating security information to facilitate the detection and prevention of computer security threats. In addition to supporting individual victims, it provides computer security training and technical resources to individuals and businesses in computer-related fields (Dhawan et al., 2019).

Recommendations, especially for future work and unsolved problems.

While significant efforts have been made to combat online scams, several unsolved problems still exist (Wen et al., 2023).

Some of the recommendations for future work in this area include:

Improving the user experience

Users will accept online payments provided they have an easy and fast experience. Current technologies cannot offer a flawless user experience, and online users remain vulnerable to fraud (Dong et al., 2023). It is imperative to develop payment solutions that are convenient, secure, and easy to use.

Ensuring the privacy of sensitive information

The online payment market is poised to expand significantly, and secure methods for keeping users' personal and financial information are critical.

Developing and implementing real-time countermeasures

 In addition to fraud detection technologies, it is also essential to create and implement real-time countermeasures to minimize the damages that result from online fraud. Most existing countermeasures are based on user feedback to detect malicious activity (Coluccia et al., 2020). It makes them ineffective as many legitimate actions can result in the users experiencing a service outage; example, excessive usage of a storage service, excessive bandwidth usage, excessive disk usage.

Developing a robust platform for reporting and notification

Fraud reports can be made by the users of online services, example, by reporting fraud via online interfaces or by emailing the online service administrators and asking them to take appropriate actions. However, there are several problems with making online fraud reports. The first problem is that online fraud reports are prone to fraudulent reporting, which can result in the users receiving no response or receiving messages that are not necessarily related to their information. The second problem is that online fraud reports are limited to users with their accounts set up to make online fraud reports (Wen et al., 2023). However, many users are unaware of the online fraud reporting capabilities and cannot report fraud using their online accounts (Bandiaky et al., 2023).

Developing and implementing advanced fraud detection technologies

With the increasing sophistication of online scammers, it is essential to create and implement advanced fraud detection technologies to detect and prevent fraud in real time. These technologies can identify when a transaction is illegitimate and alert the user and merchant to prevent them from executing the trade. Thus, existing online fraud detection techniques are not robust, are limited in effectiveness, and have several limitations. Accordingly, providing a more robust fraud detection, detection reporting, and notification process is desirable (Coluccia et al., 2020).

References

Bandiaky, O. N., Clouet, R., Le Bars, P., Soueidan, A., & Le Guehennec, L. (2023). The marginal and internal fit of five‐unit zirconia fixed dental prostheses fabricated with digital scans and conventional impressions: A comparative in vitro study—Journal of Prosthodontics.

Coluccia, A., Pozza, A., Ferretti, F., Carabellese, F., Masti, A., & Gualtieri, G. (2020). Online romance scams: Relational dynamics and psychological characteristics of the victims and scammers. A scoping review. Clinical practice and epidemiology in mental health: CP & EMH, 16, 24.

Dong, H., Chen, X., Särkkä, S., & Stachniss, C. (2023). Online pole segmentation on range images for long-term LiDAR localization in urban environments. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 159, 104283.

Dhawan, S., Gangireddy, S. C. R., Kumar, S., & Chakraborty, T. (2019). Spotting collective behaviour of online frauds in customer reviews. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.13649.

Kim, E., Wise, K., Erdelez, S., & Chiang, Y. H. (2023). Development of a scale for measuring individual propensity for serendipitous information encounters online—Journal of Information Science, 01655515221141041.

Wen, J., Tang, J., Liu, H., Qian, C., & Fan, X. (2023). Real-Time Scan-to-Map Matching Localization System Based on Lightweight Pre-Built Occupancy High-Definition Map. Remote Sensing, 15(3), 595.

You Might Also Like:

Online Dissertation Experts

Top Travel SL Company Case Study & Online Marketing Assessment Answer

Business Strategy Analysis for an Online Wine Distribution Platform Assessment Answer

Looking For Complete Assignment Sample Get It On WhatsApp