Avoiding Internet Scams from Emails- Oprah Winfrey's Special

The internet has fast become one of the most popular ways to try and scam someone. Increasingly, this has been done through the use of fraudulent emails. Oprah Winfrey aired a show on April 13, 2007, about this devious method of making money from others. This show was quite timely, as many people are scammed out of their life savings every day by these web provocateurs. The main types of emails used for the scams include announcing someone to have won a foreign lottery, someone is dying and wants to leave you their fortune, and a company needs to update your personal information. A great percentage of these fraudulent emails originates in Nigeria. By becoming aware of the scams, hopefully you can protect yourself from becoming a victim of internet fraud.

About the Emails and How to Protect Yourself

The biggest thing to do is just not open any emails that you aren't sure of the sender. Well, that's what you would think. But when you get an email from Paypal telling you they need to update your information, and you have a paypal account, what would ever make you think this was a scam? At this point, following simple guidelines about not opening emails is not enough to protect yourself. At this point, you have to stay up to date on the email scams, and maybe even ahead of the game.

How do you do this? Keep up to date on current scams. One way to go about this is to go to different websites to learn about scams. One such website is the fbi at fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/internetschemes.htm . This website talks about the Nigerian letter or "419" scam, also discussed on the Oprah show. Other websites can be found by typing in Internet scams, or email scams, on the search engine and visiting the sites to learn more. One other useful site was internetfraud.usdoj.gov. This website doesn't focus on emails, however. It talks about not receiving merchandise you paid for after winning ebay auctions, etc.

Hopefully, you caught the episode of the Oprah Winfrey show that aired yesterday in the afternoon and late at night. The show talked about many examples of internet email scams, and what happened to particular people and how they got scammed. The first type of email to avoid is the Nigerian Letter or 419 scam. Here, someone has money that they need to get out of Nigeria using your personal bank account to transfer the funds. In order for them to be able to get the money to you, they ask you to send them money to help them get their fortunes into your bank account. They promise to let you keep a portion of the money they help you get out of the country. The scam is that once you send them the money, you never see any portion of their fortune. Also, the Nigerian government has no sympathy for this scam, since you were breaking one of their laws to help someone get money out of Nigeria illegally. (This is the Nigerian law 419). Even worse, once you stop sending them money, they will use the personal information you gave them to actually start pulling funds out of your accounts on their own. This and more information can be found on the fbi.gov website.

On the show, they discussed how there is now a crackdown on such scams in Nigeria. They showed an example of some scammers in Nigeria being found out at a frequently used Nigerian internet cafe, and busted and taken to jail! However, there are still many scammers yet still undiscovered. It could take years to find all the Nigerian scammers and bring them to justice. And, while trying to stop this type of fraud, more still exist...

Oprah then talked about another type of scam- where you have won the lottery in a foreign country. To get the funds, you have to first pay the taxes. You give your personal information and they send you checks to pay some of the taxes. Then, you send money to somewhere to pay the taxes, and you keep sending more and more money. Then you find out that the place you were paying the taxes was set up by the scammer, and you have lost the money. And you never get the lottery winnings because they never existed. The internet scammers have created very official looking documents and checks, which can even fool a bank. So the bank cashes the checks given to you to pay the taxes, and then later you find out these checks too were fraudulent, and you are out even more money.

The third type of email to avoid is one from a business you normally associate with, asking you to update your personal information. When you update your personal information, the scammers get your username and password, and are able to access your account. If it's a credit card, they can make purchases and even withdrawal cash. If it is paypal, they can get money taken out of your checking account tied to your paypal account. This example actually happened to me. I must have opened an email from paypal and provided some sort of information, not knowing it. I don't recall doing this, but somehow someone got my username and password and made three purchases from my paypal account. Luckily, paypal has a policy that safeguards you against fraud, and so I was able to get the money back. I had also notified the seller so they could cancel the transaction and not send the merchandise to the scamming buyers. Do not trust or open any email from a company you do business with asking for your personal information. No company will actually send you an email asking for your personal information legitimately- this is the biggest piece of information you need to know.

Conclusion

It is very scary to think about the growing number of internet scams accomplished through emails. It is to the point that just reading and responding to emails can put you at risk of losing your lifelong savings and then some! All you can do is be smarter than the scammers. Watch tv shows such as Oprah Winfrey to find out about current scam-techniques. Go to websites to learn about the newest scams. Use google search engines to find out about scamming on the internet and by email. And, just be very careful whenever you give your personal information over the internet. If you ever give personal information, make it initiated by you by going directly on your own through your internet explorer to the site, not through a link provided in an email. Hopefully, we will be able to put an end to internet scammers through email and all other means!