Identity Theft
The Freakonomics blog gives us a heads-up on their forthcoming article in the New York Times about identity theft. It's a subject that exercises the minds of Americans more than Brits, I think, but it's still a serious issue here. Certainly getting more serious as fraudsters get cleverer in their methods.
The internet has made it a lot easier for dodgy types to get our money. Just look at this fake Bank of America site. Unless you're a sophisticated internet user it's easy to be fooled. Worryingly, Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) says that in this paper called “Why Phishing Works,” computer scientists Rachna Dhamija (Harvard) and J.D. Tygar and Marti Hearst (both at Berkeley) found that the best phishing sites were able to fool 9 out of 10 people.
One thing we will be doing on the Moneymagpie site is updating readers with information of the latest scams as they come along. No small task as new ones come up all the time. Just a few days ago, a friend forwarded an email she had had through a recruitment site which offered her a 'job' receiving payments by BACS. The email went: "It is a part-time job that consists of receiving payments from customers (through bank transfers) and then making further payments to our main office or to one of our regional affiliated departments, depending on the customer's location. Your commission as an agent is 6% of each transaction. For example, if you receive 2000 GBP to your bank account, you will withdraw the money and keep 120 GBP for yourself. Your salary will be approximately 12000 GBP per year. The hours for this work are flexible and can be combined with any permanent or other part-time job, with an average workload of up to
10 hours a week."
Dodgy? It has to be. Sounds like either money-laundering or a type of cheque-clearing scam. But, as she said, it also sounds enticing. That's where the problem lies. We have to be more careful than ever.
The Freakonomics blog gives us a heads-up on their forthcoming article in the New York Times about identity theft. It's a subject that exercises the minds of Americans more than Brits, I think, but it's still a serious issue here. Certainly getting more serious as fraudsters get cleverer in their methods.
The internet has made it a lot easier for dodgy types to get our money. Just look at this fake Bank of America site. Unless you're a sophisticated internet user it's easy to be fooled. Worryingly, Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) says that in this paper called “Why Phishing Works,” computer scientists Rachna Dhamija (Harvard) and J.D. Tygar and Marti Hearst (both at Berkeley) found that the best phishing sites were able to fool 9 out of 10 people.
One thing we will be doing on the Moneymagpie site is updating readers with information of the latest scams as they come along. No small task as new ones come up all the time. Just a few days ago, a friend forwarded an email she had had through a recruitment site which offered her a 'job' receiving payments by BACS. The email went: "It is a part-time job that consists of receiving payments from customers (through bank transfers) and then making further payments to our main office or to one of our regional affiliated departments, depending on the customer's location. Your commission as an agent is 6% of each transaction. For example, if you receive 2000 GBP to your bank account, you will withdraw the money and keep 120 GBP for yourself. Your salary will be approximately 12000 GBP per year. The hours for this work are flexible and can be combined with any permanent or other part-time job, with an average workload of up to
10 hours a week."
Dodgy? It has to be. Sounds like either money-laundering or a type of cheque-clearing scam. But, as she said, it also sounds enticing. That's where the problem lies. We have to be more careful than ever.
posted by Jasmine Birtles @ 8:48 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home