Guarding against online frauds
By A. Shukor Rahman
14th January 2002 (Computimes)

THE Internet may have altered lifestyles of many around the world. Depending of one's experience, this could be good or bad.

The good thing is that the Internet enables fast, efficient and low-cost communications among the people around the world. It also provides an easy mean for people to access and share all type of information.

Unfortunately, evil is always lurking around wherever there is good. Traditional fraudulent schemes such as the pyramid schemes as well as outright con jobs have also found their way into the cyber world.

I recently received an electronic mail (e-mail) supposedly from a manager in a bank somewhere Burkina Faso, West Africa, with an offer to make big bucks. The "business proposal" is rather straightforward - pretend to be the next-of-kin of a foreign customer who died in a plan crash in 1997 (together with his entire family - amazing!), and claim the US$18.5 million (RM70.3 million) from his account. The reward... 30 per cent of the fortune. My personal details, including information of bank accounts, are needed to facilitate the process.

Now, how do you like that?

A fraudulent invitation to commit fraud.

Certainly, this is not the first get-rich-quick proposal that I have received through e-mails. There were few others similar to this one (usually, the story involves stashed fortunes somewhere in Africa). And of course, there were the lotto "winning numbers" online offers.

Even at a quick glance, one can sense that all these are attempts to defraud people. At an individual level the amount may be small but it can add up to a hefty sum.

Shoddy scheme. Personally, I would think that nobody in the right mind would fall for such a shoddy scheme. But then again, human have the tendency to be greedy. And when greed takes over, people may end up doing the silliest things.

There are also other, smoother fraud cases on the Net. Take a recent Invest Better 2001 case in the United States for example.

As it turned out, a 17-year-old college student (and a couple of friends) had managed to dupe people into investing over US$1 million via his Web site and Internet bulletin board.

The scheme promised guaranteed return to investors of 125 to 2,500 per cent within a specified period, ranging from three days to several weeks. This definitely sounds too good to be true, but there are people who want to get rich quick without much effort.

Locally, there have not been any report of anyone falling victim to such online frauds although many have become victims to the real-world equivalent con job - the get-rich-quick scheme.

Perhaps, we are lucky that Malaysian in general have yet to fully trust the Internet when it comes to monetary transactions. Then again, we may never know. Most victims prefer to suffer in silence and hide the greed-induced stupid things that they have done.

However, there have been reports of individuals who had been duped into giving substantial amounts of money to their online acquaintances because of some sob stories and urgent calls for help. Like greed, passion and caring nature in some individuals can also be an element for the unscrupulous predator to capitalise on.

There were also reports of Internet-chatting teenagers being sexually compromised by their online acquaintances during their real-world dates. This is perhaps worse but I think it's more of a social issue that an online con case.

Online characters. In my opinion, the root of the problem is that youths, impressionable but inexperienced about life, tend to take virtual world for real. They tend to take the online characters of their fellow chatters as the persons' real-life characters. In some cases, this may be true but on the whole, not likely.

How many chatters use their real names or at least, their real-world nicknames in the chat room? Typically, one's online character will have to match his/her online nick, and one can be anyone in the cyberworld. Jack the Ripper would probably be Prince Charming in chat rooms and woo all the ladies (not that one can really tell).

As we rush towards achieving the desired knowledge-based nation, calls are made for people to savour information and communications technology (ICT) and embrace the Internet.

Effectively, this also pushes our younger generation straight into the cyber world. The young ones are spending more and more time online. Question: with so much time spent in the virtual world, with virtual online pals, can they learn enough about facts of life, about real people, before becoming adults?