Internet scams and frauds

Internet represents an open society and like everything else in the real world there are good guys and bad guys and you should know the difference.
There are people who constantly look for easy way to make money without realising that there is no such thing as easy money. There are after all no free lunches as the famous quote of Schuamacher goes from his Small is beautiful book.


Here is the latest one I received through e-mail!


Yahoo & Window Live Awards Centre
124 Stockport Road, Longsight, Manchester M60 2DB - United Kingdom
Tel: +44 704 5744 259, Fax: +44 705 380 5207.


Yahoo Awards Center124 Stockport Road, Longsight, Manchester M60 2DB United Kingdom. This is to inform you that you have won a prize money of Two Hundredand Fifty Thousand Great Britain Pounds (GBP 250,000) for the month ofSeptember, 2007 Prize promotion which is organized by YAHOO AWARDS & WINDOWS LIVE

yeah, I seek to have become rich by 250,000 pounds and if I convert it into rupees which is my country currency I wouldnt even know how many zeros to put in the final figure!

Well obviously I sent it to the spam box which is where such messages belong! and I did some digging to find out how serious is this fraud. Here is what I found from the net.


Go and collect 820k Euro from yAhoo Awards Center

Updated Aug 07.Yahoo Awards Center Lottery or Sweepstake is a Scam.

The following is the info from Yahoo regarding this scam:"No. There is no Yahoo! Lottery, and we would never send you information about a contest you never entered.That’s the definition of unsolicited: you never asked for it. It showed up out of nowhere. The message probably also displays two other hallmarks of fraud emails: it appears to be official (with company logos, even links), and it demands urgent action “to claim your prize”, or something similar more

Here is the link to what yahoo has to say about such unsolicited mails go for link


there is another genre of mails which come to you carrying a sob story about some air crash and the victim somehow magically will have your first name or surname--how they find out your name from the net is amazing-- and would be from your country. The scamsters would tempt you by saying as solicitors or advocates privvy to the bank account of the deceased they will help you to settle it with the bank and split the proceeds, usually running to millions--how come every air crash victim is a millionnaire is another amazing point, I for one travel a lot and I cant claim to be even a remotely a millionnaire!

Well a long trail of e-mails will follow with you and the scamster if you are dumb enough to answer the first one and someday soon the fraudster will send you a mail with all due respects asking you deposit some few hundred dollars to cover some expense or the other which he is unable to do owing to some currency problem or some such legitimate sounding excuse. The money being deposited by you will be the last act in this drama. All this guy was interested was not in the millions the victim purportedly had in his account when he died in air crash but the measely few hundred that you would be guillible enough to part with! a few hundred suckers like you every week from around the world and the scamster will surely become a millionnaire, air crash or not!

What remedy you have when you get some mail like this and you send your money in. practially none but you can certainly be able to tell whether you are getting duped or not right from the start. For one, please send such messages to the trash bin as soon as you see these. second look up the internet to find places which report on such frauds and learn the pattern of such messages for you to recognise these. There are good samaritan sites like these for you to learn about scams

1. www.hotscams.com
2. www.scambusters.org
3. Wikipaedia fraud reporting

such others

Please also follow the following article link which has classified the Internet frauds in to 12 categories and another overview article on the same subject