The number of online scams of which Italians are victims, thanks to the increased use of services on the Web following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Social networks, messaging services such as WhatsApp and obviously e-mail is the main threat vectors.
The alarming figure is confirmed by the report published at the beginning of the year by the Postal and Communications Police, which highlights the risks related to the proliferation of online fake news, a phenomenon that has literally exploded in recent months (+ 436% of reports compared to 2020). According to the police, about 98,000 online frauds were recorded last year, however, this could only represent the tip of the iceberg, as this type of crime is often not reported by victims.
According to research conducted by European Commission Regarding the experience of consumers with regard to fraud and scams, over half of the Europeans surveyed in the last 2 years have been victims of some type of online fraud.
Below, we analyze some of the main online scams, explaining how to avoid them.
Buying on sites that offer products at bargain prices is probably a leading cause of online fraud. Tens of thousands of malicious sites are created every day by criminal organizations, they are portal full of tempting offers designed to steal victims’ payment details. The data obtained through these sites is resold in the criminal underground or immediately used to empty current accounts. You notice the scam only after days, when the ordered goods do not arrive and you try to contact the portal used for the purchase, or when counterfeit goods arrive at home.
Criminal organizations advertise these sites through social media in some cases to make the offers credible, they pretend to be auctions, but despite the many variations, the scope is the same: defrauding the victims. The advice to avoid these frauds is to make purchases only on well-known sites with a proven reputation.
Among the most insidious online frauds there are certainly the romantic scams: in this case, the criminals try to circumvent the victims in search of a soul mate through dating sites or various chats. The promise is that of a lasting relationship, the criminals establish intense communication with the victims, even exchanging images with them often stolen from legitimate social profiles.
Once a virtual relationship has been established, victims are asked for sums of money for different reasons (example: requests for money based on personal difficulties) by leveraging their emotional involvement. Dangerous variants have also been observed, in which criminals first exchange intimate photos with victims, once obtained, they blackmail them and demand payment of money to avoid publication. Unfortunately, these scams are often not reported out of shame, leaving online predators unpunished.
The suggestion in this case is avoid any virtual relationship, especially those in which the interlocutor does not reveal himself and tries to accelerate mutual knowledge always and only online. An online search of the suitor’s image used could reveal that it was actually stolen from another person’s social profile. Avoid making appointments with people you know online except in the presence of friends and acquaintances.
And what are the main ones online scams to the detriment of companies?
Scams known as Business Email Compromise (Bec) represent the main type of fraud perpetrated against our companies. In Bec scams, criminals send an email to victims, the email appears as coming from a known and trusted source, and usually makes a legitimate request. Some examples of Bec are:
- A supplier that your company deals with on a regular basis send an invoice, similar to the previous ones, which however requires payment to a new bank account.
- The CEO of a company asks an employee with spending power of order the purchase of shopping vouchers to be distributed to employees as a reward. He asks to receive vouchers at a specific address so he can send them personally
- The CEO, out on a business trip, asks an employee with the power to access company accounts to arrange a bank transfer to a current account with the utmost urgency in order to facilitate a negotiation in which he himself is involved.
The possible variants they are limited only by the imagination of criminals, and in real cases hundreds of thousands of euros have been stolen from the victims with these techniques.
The defense against these scams it requires companies to adopt well-defined processes that involve, in cases like this, contacting the presumed sender of the message through a different channel, for example by telephone, to verify the authenticity of the request.
What is the turnover of this criminal practice? According to the annual report published by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (Ic3), Bec scams have caused more than $ 1.8 billion in losses to US companies in the past year, an amount that must cause us to reflect on the impact of online fraud on our businesses.
The online frauds described are just a few countless ones criminal activities in which you can come across: their impact from an economic and emotional point of view is often catastrophic, for this reason it is important to learn to recognize them and not be caught unprepared.
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