Cyber crimes will turn out be the biggest frauds of 2012. The fraudster will turn to technology as the medium to siphon money, obtain data, and disrupt business. The FBI says in 2011 it received 300,000 cybercrime complaints a month.
Most of these grievances involve either the theft of consumers’ identities, other personal information or scams sent by cyber criminals to individuals whose private contact information was obtained through nefarious means. As Internet users share increasingly more information on social media and other websites, their vulnerability to having their identities stolen or privacy violated increases dramatically.
Methods used in cyber crimes include stealing personal data from all sources of internet interaction, malware attacks, crowdturfing, and whaling.
Malware attacks focus on business disruption and hacking; typically affecting small businesses. Crowdturfing is the best method for the social media fraudster as it persuades the public towards one specific market direction and is a form of civil disorder. Whaling is the collecting of high end individuals’ data to sell to other fraudsters for fraudulent scams.
Ways to protect yourself in the cyber world include keeping your birth date private, securing passwords that are not easily presumed and using different passwords for every online account you have. Use your social network privacy settings to keep your information from being public, avoid downloading mobile and Facebook apps that are not found in the official app store on your device and consider disabling GPS location services on your phone. Of special note is secure private browsing. Every major web browser has a function which prevents cookies from being permanently saved on your computer’s hard drive. Internet Explorer offers “In Private browsing”, while Firefox has “Private Browsing mode” and Google Chrome sports “Incognito mode”.
Lastly, protect yourself by insuring that any websites you might enter sensitive personal information in has a website security certificate and the URL begins with “https”.
If you know of a scam, contact THE FRAUD DOG, at 855-Fraud Dog. Also be sure to report to local law enforcement.