MisTek - Technological Misbehaviour

Digg It! We’ve decided to come up with a list of the ways that people have been using the internet to defraud, deflower and dethrone folks based on the motivation of the almighty dollar. Let’s face it - almost every time someone takes a piece of technology and decides to use it for evil, it is almost always motivated by a desire for money or power. So here they are - these are the most popular ways that people have been abusing the internet to make a bit of extra chump change.

1. Click Fraud - This has been the granddaddy of 2006 and we think it is important enough that it will bring down a few companies (it has already created its own industry). So what is it all about? Well the most common version of click fraud is done with Google’s adsense. Fraudsters just get themselves a free blog, sign up for an Adsense account and start clicking on their own ads. They get some buddies from different areas to join in and voila! They have just joined the fastest growing area of fraud on the internet. Now Google does have some measures in place to stop this, but they sure don’t seem to be crippling the fraudsters. Both easy and popular!

2. Email Spam - OK, so it’s illegal and a few governments have even started enforcing the laws they have passed against it, but people are still doing it. Why? Because it is profitable! Just get a little program to mine thousands of email addresses off the internet, join up with some affiliate program promoting viagra and blast the new list with promises of lasting all night. This one is a numbers game - send out 10,000 emails and they might get a response or two. It’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s profitable (unless they get caught).

3. Phishing - Taking advantage of idiots would be almost amusing if it weren’t so irritating for everyone else to receive this nonsense in their inboxes. A basic phishing scam is for a fraudster pretending to be from paypal to send out an email to a list, saying that something is wrong with your account and you need to log in and fix it. You click on the link in the email and log in and presto - the fraudster now has your username and password and can use it to get access to your money. How? Easy - he just sent you (via the link in his email) to a site he created for the purpose of stealing your info. There are plenty of variation on this scam, but it always seems to trap a few people.

4. Blog Comment Spam - This is another easy one. In fact there are free programs available that allow you to send out a specific message to thousands of blogs “commenting” on their blog but conveniently leaving a link to a site (packed with advertising) or sometimes directly to an Affiliate link selling viagra or some rubbish. This is blog comment spam! It is causing major lost productivity for bloggers who have to moderate and delete this rubbish and even Google is cracking down on it, but it persists because people can make a few bucks.

5. Lead Fraud - this is kind of a variation on the click fraud scenrio. Basically it involves our dishonest friends signing up to Affiliate programs that offer payment to people who send them sales leads (usually email address, phone number, name etc). A lot of money can be possible made by filling in the lead forms with bogus information from the internet. Most often, the merchant’s catch onto this behaviour but sometimes they don’t meaning that fraudsters can get away with a bit of money.

6. Credit Card Fraud - This one is talked about a lot. Credit card information can be found with search engines!! It’s actually quite easy to find stolen credit card info on the internet. Then the thief starts making purchases online! It takes a little bit of messing around with addresses and phone numbers but the information on how to scam companies out of goods with stolen credit cards is all on the internet and plenty of people make use of it.

7. Hack’n'fix - An oldie but a goodie. Some hacker defaces your website and then you receive an email from them telling you about how insecure your site is and that you should hire them to make it more secure. And people fall for it! Arghgh!

This list is about the most common ways that people are abusing our beloved internet for a few extra bucks. Every year these strategies are costing regular consumers more and more, but hey - at least someone is making some coin.