WAMBUGU: Curiosity and vanity every scammer’s bait

Just like there are many conmen in Kenya, especially in jails, who lure people into sending money through mobile phone services, there are many others operating under the veil of the internet and e-mail, who trick people into losing personal valuable information as well as their bank accounts.

The good news is that, with a little bit of foreknowledge, these hoaxes are easy to detect. Hidden within the colourful prose of your average e-mail hoax often lurk telling indicators of the email’s veracity.

Hoax writers want their material to spread as far and as fast as possible.

Almost every hoax e-mail will, in some way, exhort you to send it to other people. Some e-mail hoaxes take a more targeted approach and suggest that you send the e-mail to a specified number of people in order to collect a prize or realise some kind of benefit.

For the last 15 years, we have gotten used to these online scams. But for the uninitiated, be wary of any e-mail that asks you to click on a link and provide sensitive personal information such as banking details. If you have been using e-mail for any length of time, at some point you have probably received an e-mail in the form of a petition.

The message requests you to “sign” the petition by adding your name before sending it on to others in your address book. E-mails of this nature generally contain a few paragraphs of text explaining the purpose and intended goals of the petition as well as instructions about how to sign and forward the message.

Such petitions are of no value since the e-mail originator has no way of ascertaining the authenticity of the signatures.

Some scams involve e-mails that appear to be from Facebook itself, or popular sites. Armed with user names and passwords, thieves will hijack Facebook accounts to target people on their friends list.

A simple scheme might use a template from a genuine Facebook e-mail to ask millions of people to update their security questions because of unauthorised access attempts against their accounts. Then when you do, the scamsters snatch your personal information.

Still more vulnerable are the many users who accept all friend invitations, along with those having low or no security settings on their accounts.

CURIOUS MESSAGES WITH LINKS

Scammers are also active on twitter. You can get a message like “Can you believe she posted this about you?” with a link attached. Of course your first thought is “Who said what?”, and you want to click on the link.

You should never click on these links though. Get it from me no one said anything about you and if you do go ahead and click on the link you will probably be hit with some nasty malware that could lead to identity theft.

A malware is software that attacks the user’s computer or for phishing, the act of trying to gather credit card numbers, passwords or other personal information through links to phony giveaways or contests.

Now, there is also too-common Profile Viewer Tracking malware on Facebook. That you click on a link on a Facebook profile and see how many people have seen your profile.

However, this is just not a feature that Facebook offers. There is no programme that you can download that will show you who has viewed your Facebook profile. If you try to download one of these programmes, you will probably be left with some type of malware.

Simply liking a post, or the page itself, can’t spread a virus or phish a user. But malicious Facebook apps can, as can external links that page owners may choose to share to their followers. A common denominator in most of these scams is the desire to make easy money, curiosity and vanity.

Sam Wambugu is a monitoring and evaluation specialist. [email protected]