Online Extortion Scams-The Fear Factor!!
A new type of scam circulating and duping innocent people of hard earned money is the online extortion scam. Unlike most scams which try to cash in on two main factors ie. Economic slowdown and opportunity to make quick money, online extortion scams cash in on the very basic aspect of the human mindset-fear.
First surfacing in December of 2008, this scam e-mail threatens to kill the recipient of the scam email unless otherwise they obey to pay their lives out of the “situation”.
The cyber crime division of FBI has received many such reports of online extortion threats.
The best possible way to tackle such scam threats is to not respond. This will result in two advantages-1) De-escalating the intimidation and 2) the scammers sending such scam email will fail to know if your email ID is a live account or not.
In one such online extortion scams, reported to the FBI, the recipient of the threat responded and warned the scammer of reporting the matter to the authorities. The scammer emailed back with the recipient’s complete personal information and even names of his children.
Officials investigating such cases inform the public that they should not be overly threatened by such a trick (forwarding personal information) as now-a-days personal information can be easily procured by any scammer even without a computer.
The best defense according to officials at FBI is to delete unopened and spam email.
Related posts:
- Death Threat Email: Did you get one recently?
- Scam Alert : Fake Email Sponsors Stimulus Payments
- Twitter Scam Can result Identity theft
- Pharming: The Internet Scam that can wipe out Online Banking!
- E-mail Scams Still Going Strong ,Warns IRS
