We’re all appalled at scammers who take advantage of people’s fears to sell them products they don’t need, or worse still products that don’t exist and never arrive.
Worst of all, perhaps, are the scammers who offer products and services that do exactly the opposite of what they claim – making their victims pay up simply to make them even easier to defraud in future.
Well-known cyberexamples of this sort of fraud include:
- Fake technical support incidents. These are the web popups or the phone calls you get out of the blue that report ‘viruses’ on your computer, and persuade you to ‘hire’ the services of an online ‘expert’ to remove them. Often these victims are lonely, vulnerable, and particularly ill-placed to deal with the financial loss. The scammers then target those individuals repeatedly and, in some cases we have heard, with ever-increasing aggression.