online scam

Cyber crooks unsurprisingly pounced on the tragedy in Japan using earthquake and tsunami reports for their own venal purposes. According to the reports by security researchers scams come ranging from links to fake anti-virus downloads and phony donation sites to classic online swindles that rely on greed.

A lawsuit against nationwide scam scheme that defrauds millions of Americans under guise of governmental help was filed by the US Federal Trade Commission. The regulators has asked a court to stop a "far-reaching" Internet enterprise that allegedly made millions of dollars by luring customers into trial memberships for bogus government grants and money-making schemes, then repeatedly charging them monthly fees for memberships they never ordered.

The excitement spurred this week by the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops video game was exploited by the scamsters to lure unwitting users into giving away their personal information.

GFI Security researcher Chris Boyd warns that supposed cracks for the eagerly awaited first-person shooter actually take gamers through a variety of shonky online surveys.

A Washington Post security blogger Brian Krebs found that scareware victims in most cases do not claw back credit card payments for worthless software packages. Krebs contacted victims of scareware scams according to the list of users duped into buying rogue anti-virus packages. The data came from caches of data maintained by rogue anti-virus affiliates, a key sales channel for scareware developers.

While being not new to the Internet users online scams that defraud unwitting people of money through social engineering are still on the rise, as reported by the FBI and its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). In these fraud schemes perpetrators try to steal victims’ money posing as a good friend left stranded somewhere in need of quick cash.

A security company Symantec has published a list of the 50 American cities most vulnerable to cyberattacks. The report ranked Seattle at the top, followed by Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Raleigh. Atlanta, Minneapolis, Denver, Austin, and Portland round out Symantec's top 10 riskiest locations.

It does not mean that those cities are now dangerous to live and people should fear walking along the streets, it is more about the availability of tech factors that make these locations a convenient place for cyber crooks to defraud people.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released its another report on the top Internet scams of 2009.

Iovation, a provider of solutions for preventing online fraud and abuse, reported successful results of its partnership with its customer New Era Tickets, a full-service ticketing solution provider created by Comcast-Spectacor.

New Era Tickets have been using iovation’s device-based fraud management solution to successfully identify cyber criminals and stop ticket fraud. To date the company has reduced fraud losses for its arena clients while protecting customers against purchasing stolen or duplicate tickets.

In a move to prevent and minimize online scams the UK government has introduced a specialist cyber-enforcement team and allocated extra funding for Trading Standards.

In December the Federal Trade Commission announced its new online portal called You Are Here. The service represents a virtual mall where kids can learn to avoid online scams, spot misleading ads, and learn good habits to be smart consumers.