Legal Commentary

Avoiding internet scams

By David Canton

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today.  It reads as follows.

Dan wrote yesterday about what to do if hackers steal your online accounts.  As a companion to that, Yahoo!Canada has an article from Real Simple magazine entitled Scams Even you Could Fall For – And How to Avoid Them. 

It talks about things like phony gift card offers, mails that look like they come from your bank, sellers of fake items like event tickets, and fake charities. It also suggests some resources to use for checking to see if things are legit.  Sometimes just doing a Google or Bing search will ferret out if something is a common scam.

Fraudsters and malware distributors are always trying to stay 1 step ahead of spam filters, and often manage to get things through that look amazingly like legitimate messages from Facebook or other social networking sites.

Remember to be skeptical about communications that carry either really good news, really bad news, or that require some immediate action to avoid a dire consequence.  If, for example, you receive a message that purports to be from your bank – just call the bank at the number you have for them (not a number that thecommunication tells you.)  Instead of clicking on a link that says its to a facebook message, just log onto facebook in the normal way to see if there is a message there.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on October 06, 2010 (boomark / email).