While internet is a blessing for most of the people, it can turn out to be extremely dangerous for a few people too. The reason behind this is the fact that the difficulty in catching anyone over the internet has made many ill-minds take to scamming people out of their hard earned money. The history of internet is filled with internet scams that tried to con the people. Here is a list of the top 10 internet scams that have been regularly successful in royally fooling a long list of people.
1. Nigerian Money Scam
Even though this scam remains one of the most written over the web, people still fall for this scam even today. The scam usually starts as an e-mail from a rich Nigerian lady who wants to move her money from the country to your country. These e-mails are usually too good to be true but many people fall for them and end up getting conned out of their own money.
2. The PayPal Scam
This is probably one of the dangerous scams as they are usually the most difficult to detect. Such scams usually start with response to ads to sell items. You would get a great offer for your item and then you would be transferred the money into your PayPal account. However, after a couple of days, PayPal would take back the money simply because the buyer would say that he didn’t receive the item or it might be that the buyer was actually using a stolen account.
3. Free Trial Items
Scammers offer free trials of expensive items and then ask for your banking information and other details just for shipping charges or handling fees. However, they end up charging you the fee for the item every month if you don’t cancel the ‘free trial’. Most people don’t even realize that they have to cancel the subscription and thus, end up paying a heavy price.
4. Fake Travel Plans
You would always want to save on your vacation costs as well as on your travel plans and scammers target this lot of the times. You would be promised the world for free with these plans while you would end up with nothing in return normally. If a deal sounds too good to be true then it has to be a scam.
5. Work From Home
This scam does screw a lot of people each day. Scammers promise the people that they would get a program that would help them earn millions through home and ask for either some personal information or ask you to pay a small fee. Since there is no program which can earn you millions within a day, this should be easy to detect.
6. Fake Auctions
This scam is usually hard to detect as it is carried out on reputed sites like Craigslist etc. The scammers simply put a product or item on sale for a surprisingly low price and then just take the money and run away without actually selling you the item.
7. Software Popups
A very popular scam at the moment revolves around proposed software that will clean your computer from viruses. When browsing, you would come across a website at one time or the other which would come up with a popup that tells you that you are computer is under threat and needs to be cleaned immediately. The scammers would usually either ask for a fee for the software or would try to extract your personal information by using the software as a means to insert various viruses onto your system.
8. Online Dating Websites
Oh well, this remains one unusually popular scam and people do fall for it a lot of the times. There are a number of online dating sites that are operated by scammers. Here regular users would find a fake boyfriend or girlfriend who would ask for some funds as they are abroad at the moment. However, once the money is sent, the person would simply disappear.
9. Lotteries
People fall for lottery scams a number of times because they believe them to be true. Such scams are intelligently crafted and offer you prize money for things that you might or might not have done. For instance, for regular Yahoo usage/Google usage, you got entered into a lottery program and won $100,000. The scammers usually require personal information through this scam and then use it to take your money.
10. Disaster Donations
A real gutting scam revolves around online donations. Whenever a country is hit by a natural crisis, you will start getting e-mails from fake donation companies which would ask you to donate your money. Such money is usually bagged by the scammers unfortunately.
