Online Scams
As we progress more and more technologically, scams and online hoaxes are becoming more and more relevant. One such scam going around that I’ve seen is where someone gets a hold of a name from your contact list and emails you pretending to be them. The emails are always very short, but the generally ask you to have a look at some like, or open a picture. These have gotten even more elaborate recently, where they almost completely mimic a well known site.
One of my friends fell victim to this, when he supposedly got a message from a friend asking him to check out a trading website for a video game. When he visited the site, it look exactly like the real site when asking him to log in. However, it was just a phishing site meant to get people to enter their usernames and passwords.
This is why it’s very important to really check who is sending you something, especially when it seems too good to be true, and to always be weary of website links sent to you from an un verified source. Whenever you’re suspicious of something someone sent you, you could always search it and see if other are asking about the same thing. If multiple people all received the exact same thing, it’s most likely some sort of scam.
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I once got scammed just like this. I heard there was some giveaway reward a guy was doing online, and that you could enter by posting with a friendly message saying you want in. To post your reply though, you had to log into your account, something most websites do commonly, like Instagram or Facebook. Instead of the social app, I was actually steered towards a false page the Scammer made that looked very much like the original. When I thought I was logging in to post my reply, I was actually just providing the scammer with my log-in information. It didn’t take me that long to realize my mistake, but unfortunately their computers are faster then I am, and my account was already in ruins…that is why I now provide false or a useless email (made as a tester for situations like these) as a cautionary now for most online purposes.
That’s basically what happened to my friend. Except since it was a video game, he lost all his unique stuff by the time someone asked him why he was sending a bunch of links.
This read was actually a neat thing to read, because I just saw a video about some of the work that browsers (like Google Chrome) have to go through to try and prevent look-alike sites. One of the main problems that make it tough to stop scam sites like the one that got your friend it the wide range of character available through Unicode make it easy to make “duplicate” domain names.
Wow, I knew that it was possible to get a domain name almost identical to a popular one. But I didn’t know that it could be almost exactly the same through Unicode.