On Line Scams

Again we seem to be bombarded with scams where ever we look – if scammers’ put as much energy into legitimate businesses I am sure they would be sitting on a small fortune by now! Scams are becoming more like buses, with the same style all circulating at the same time (do you think they have underground meetings, like bus depots of old and just follow one another out? No neither do I – they just lack originality, hence the reason they can’t do anything legitimate with their time!).

There are more Internet scams on the go, concentrating on the on line refund and your ability to claim. The 1st informs you that if you have been misfortunate to have suffered from on line fraud (that’s rich coming from a scam merchant!) the Bank of England (under Government instructions) will compensate you for this – surely that will convince you that it is a real service? As usual you are asked to part with valuable banking information, however with this one you have the opportunity to try and get the scammers’ tracked down!

www.ic3.gov is the American ‘Internet Crime Complaint Centre’ and have asked that should you receive an Email concerning entitlement to refunds being given out (concerning on line fraud) by the Bank of England, they would like to know about it via the above website.

The 2nd on line scam concerns the person who contacts you to let you know he holds the same Domain Name as you, only with a .com or .co.uk but would be happy to sell it to you for approximately $200!

I received an Email regarding a Domain I owned and put it straight into my spam box, however a friend of mine got himself in a real flap when he got a similar one as he was convinced he would lose his website and wanted to know the feasibility of buying the other suffixes for his Domain?

Now this one could be a legitimate business idea that may not even be illegal, but none the less it may be obtaining money out of genuine hard working business owners, who are panicked into believing they have to hold every complete web address to save their website?

Causing money to be relinquished to the person contacting them or even inducing a panic buy from a Domain store, of every last web address for their Domain is an underhanded activity as far as I am concerned and one that people should be made aware of! Hopefully it will prevent them from being parted with hard earned cash on needless transactions (I wonder how many different suffixes can be added to 1 Domain and how much it would cost [approx.] to ensure only you owned anything that resembled your Domain.anything?).

This next one continues to do the rounds and refers back to the discs that went ‘missing’, along with the Family Allowance details of thousands of people. You receive an Email to let you know that your name was found to be included on the missing discs and due to this you are entitled to claim compensation in the way of a one off payment into your account. Like many other’s that have gone before, you are asked to follow the link and enter your account details, I didn’t think anyone fell for these one’s any more so was very surprised to see it in my inbox (unless of course I missed it the first 20 times round the globe?).

At the end of the day the SNUK Blog, as with most Blogs out there will continue to up-date you as and when scams appear on the scene. Until they begin to fade out we can only hope to reach as many people as possible with this information – it is then up to yourself to network it further and inform more and more people to prevent them becoming another statistic.

Cheers

Kim