Victims on Internet Crime

There are several ways we can expose to the internet crime or we can be a victim of this problem. Internet crime is a general term that embraces such crimes as phishing, credit card frauds, identity theft, child pornography, kidnapping children via chat rooms, scams, cyber terrorism, creation and/or distribution of viruses, spam and so on. All such crimes are computer related and facilitated crimes.

With the evolution of the Internet, along came another revolution of crime where the perpetrators commit acts of crime and wrongdoing on the World Wide Web. Internet crime takes many faces and is committed in diverse fashions. The number of users and their diversity in their makeup has exposed the Internet to everyone. Some criminals in the Internet have grown up understanding this superhighway of information, unlike the older generation of users. This is why Internet crime has now become a growing problem in the United States. Some crimes committed on the Internet have been exposed to the world and some remain a mystery up until they are perpetrated against someone or some company.

1. Identity Theft

One of the fastest growing crimes in the country is identity theft. Identity theft is simply when someone steals your personal information and uses it to commit a fraudulent transaction. It's a terrible crime that can wreak havoc on not only the financial lives but also the emotional and mental well-being of its victims. One of the reasons this crime is growing so quickly is that the Internet makes it easier for the criminals to obtain other people's personal information.

Before the proliferation of the Internet identity theft still occurred. There are many off-line ways to obtain peoples personal information like stealing people's mail or going through their trash to find discarded financial documents. The Internet offers these thieves easier access to their victims sensitive information. There are websites and forums where people actually buy and sell things like credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers etc.

In addition to simply purchasing information from another criminal, one way these thieves obtain the information they're looking for is called phishing. In phishing scams, internet-based communications often purport to be from legitimate organisations, such as banks, and use that perception of a trusted relationship to get people to reveal personal information.

2. Phishing

A phishing scam the mark, or potential victim, will usually receive an e-mail asking them to click on a link taking them to an official looking webpage to fill in their personal information. The e-mail will claim to be from a legitimate business or institution such as a bank. The e-mail you receive will say something like "there's been suspicious activity on your account please click this link to log in and update your account information". If you click the link you'll be taken to a page that looks just like a page from your bank's website but it's really just a cloned page. The cloned page looks identical to your bank's page but everything you type in on that page is recorded by the person running the phishing scam. The information you typed in can now be used to steal money from your bank account, open lines of credit in your name that will be maxed out and never paid, or they may just sell your information to someone else who will do all of those things.

>>to be continuee.....

Naniey++