Mytrendingstories.com brings tips on how to avoid being scammed on the internet
Avoiding online scams advices by Mytrendingstories.com blogging portal today? The hot spot imposter (He’s close, real close)! How it works: You’re sitting in an airport or a coffee shop and you log into the local Wi-Fi zone. It could be free, or it could resemble a pay service like Boingo Wireless. You get connected, and everything seems fine. What’s really going on: The site only looks legitimate. It’s actually run by a nearby criminal from a laptop. If it’s a “free” site, the crook is mining your computer for banking, credit card, and other password information. If it’s a fake pay site, he gets your purchase payment, then sells your card number to other crooks. The big picture: Fake Wi-Fi hot spots are cropping up everywhere, and it can be difficult to tell them from the real thing. “It’s lucrative and easy to do,” says Brian Yoder, vice president of engineering at CyberDefender, a manufacturer of antivirus software. “Criminals duplicate the legitimate Web page of a Wi-Fi provider like Verizon or AT&T and tweak it so it sends your information to their laptop.”
Trending news from Mytrendingstories online platform: Stay Vigilant. You’ll want to keep a close eye out on your credit and financial account statements so you can alert your financial institution as soon as possible if anything appears amiss. If you’ve spent time job searching online lately, it might seem like there are as many scams as legitimate job openings on the job boards. The Better Business Bureau reports that job scams are on the rise and are the No. 1 riskiest scam in terms of prevalence, likelihood of losing money, and monetary loss. Each year, about 14 million people are exposed to job scams. Victims lose more than $2 billion per year, not counting the value of their time or the emotional impact of being defrauded. To safeguard yourself, it pays to learn as much as possible about employment scams.
MyTrendingStories anti-scam recommendations: After gaining a person’s trust, scammers often present a story of a personal hardship or struggle to get the victim to send money. And nearly as often, victims fall for the bait out of a mixture of generosity and what they believed was a genuine connection with their online partner. This is a mistake. You should never send money to someone online, particularly someone who you have never met in person. Additional tips to prevent you from becoming a victim of romance scams: Research the person’s photo/profile using online searches (like Google Image) to see if the material has been used elsewhere. Look out for poor grammar, spelling, unusual expressions and flowery language that don’t coincide with the person they are pretending to be. Ask a lot of questions and note any inconsistencies in current or past information they provided. Never provide personal information, including account, passport, social security or credit card numbers. New online scams pop up every week. While the internet has changed the world for the better in many ways, there is a downside. Find extra details at https://mytrendingstories.com/harjinder-surjeet/protect-seniors-against-cybercrimes-and-scams-dazcgi.
Mytrendingstories discuss how to avoid scams: One way to identify if you’re browsing a fake website is to look at the domain name. As a rule of thumb, most legitimate URLs will not have extraneous characters or misspellings. Retailer websites are simple and typically match their trademark name, according to CNBC. For example, the domain name for fashion brand Michael Kors is MichaelKors.com. Likewise, the domain name for high-end designer Gucci is Gucci.com. You can also check if the website has a universal seal of approval, such as the Norton Secured Seal. Such a seal usually indicates that the website is trustworthy, according to Consumer Reports. You can also check to see when the domain was created using Whois.
Fake calls from someone pretending to be from the Financial Ombudsman Service asking for personal financial details. The ombudsman will never call you out of the blue to ask for information – it’ll only be in touch if you’ve got a case with it already. You can find out more about financial scams on the Financial Conduct Authority’s website or for scams in general, see the Metropolitan Police’s Little Book of Big Scams, or the Citizens Advice website. Web security has come to the fore in recent years with major hacks resulting in millions of users’ account details and sensitive info being put at risk. Fortunately there’s a quick, free and easy way to check if your details have been compromised. The website HaveIBeenPwned? (‘pwned’ is geek-speak for being made a fool of – it’s pronounced ‘poned’) allows anyone to check if their accounts have been compromised in a number of known data breaches in recent times. Go to HaveIBeenPwned? and enter your email address. Enter the address you use at any sites you’re concerned may have been hacked – for example, the one you usually log in to LinkedIn with. It’ll tell you if your account’s been compromised. You’ll be shown a list of breaches you were ‘pwned’ in, with some background info on the hack, plus what data was compromised – eg, email address, password, date of birth, etc. Discover more info on mytrendingstories.com.