Spear phishing is more specific, targeting a certain person or a group. As internet users are becoming more aware of their existence, this wide-net phishing is becoming obsolete. Regular phishing relies on casting a wide net and hoping that someone will miss the cues that the website or email is fake. These attacks will look like real messages sent from some company, service, or person that asks you for your username and password. Phishing is mostly a passive scam where fake accounts, websites, and email addresses are made to look like the ones you would trust. Anything from your name, location, marital status, or even your favorite football team can be used to draw you in to click. Here the scammer will have a lot of personal data about the victim and will customize their message or scam to fit the target.īecause of this dependency on data, scammers are usually working with data thieves and hackers to collect as much information as possible. The most dangerous online scams are those that are focused specifically on a single person. These scams are also done anonymously, making the perpetrator almost impossible to find. Primarily, it is possible to cast wide nets and send scamming emails to thousands, if not millions of people. What is an Online Scam?Īn online scam is quite different than its IRL counterpart. And if you are using a foreign server, even those that can’t be blocked will often be in the language of the server country, and not your own. If you are using a premium VPN provider and are cautious about your cyber hygiene, most of these scams will be blocked. The more info on you they have the more specific the scam can be.
If you don’t invest in cybersecurity you may leave some of your personal information for scammers to collect. While some scammers try to get to this point by casting a wide net, others are more specific. For the deceit to be successful it needs to pull on some of your heartstrings. While all scams have the same goal, they are not all equally dangerous. They exist on the sole presumption that people will be taken by their emotions and do something without thinking. To paraphrase an old Russian proverb: ‘’As long as there are sheep, there will be wolves.’’ Online scams are as old as the internet.
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