Scammers are getting bolder and bolder as times go by. Gone are the days, where human beings are naive and honest. The scammers today will do anything to swindle away your hard earned money without thinking of consequences. The latest tactic used by the scammers is sending out “call for help” threatening messages such as your closed relative/friend was stranded, dying or robbed and requesting you to send money to them urgently. Such tactics is really horrible as it made messages and phone calls very suspicious. Every message or phone call that you received, you tend to think twice whether they are true or false. If it is not true, you only lose some money paying the phone charges and perhaps wasted some of your times. But if the messages are true and you choose not to believe them because of too much fraudulent messages circulating, the consequences could be very tragic if a life is at stake.
So how are you going to handle such call for help messages or phone calls? You got to analyse them yourself smartly. The below is a report of how scammers used e-mails to con money from people.
The next time you get an e-mail from a friend or relative saying they are stranded or have been robbed while overseas and need urgent cash to get back, chances are it is a scam.
Federal Commercial Crimes director Comm Datuk Koh Hong Sun advised Internet users to be cautious as there are Internet scams nationwide.
“If known names send distress e-mails requesting for financial help, try verifying the facts as there are a lot of scams out there,” he said, adding that many originated from overseas.
“These syndicates obtain peoples’ e-mail information when they send them spam mails requesting for username or passwords on the pretext of upgrading their e-mail accounts.”
Comm Koh advised Internet users to regularly change their passwords, use a password that would be hard to guess, never reveal the password to anyone and have a copy of the Internet address book just in case if you need to inform people that your e-mail has been hacked into.
In a recent case in Johor, a victim, who only wanted to be known as Leong said that he had received an official e-mail from Yahoo! saying that he needed to provide them with his particulars, including his password to upgrade their services.
“The next day I got a shock when I received over 20 calls and SMSes from friends and family asking if I was in trouble and needed help.
“They told me that they had received an e-mail from me saying that I was overseas and someone had stolen all my money and I desperately needed some money,” he said.
Leong said the e-mail also included a London-based address where his friends and family could forward their money.
“I immediately called up my closest friends and warned them of the scam,” he said but found two of them had believed the message and forwarded their credit card details to the sender.
“Now I cannot access my e-mail and I have lost all my contacts.
“I am also not sure how many other people in my contact list have forwarded money or their credit card information after reading the e-mail,” he said.
