How to recognise and avoid online scams

Today, it’s almost impossible to spend any time online without encountering someone looking to swindle you out of a few quid and scams now pose a greater online threat than hackers ever did.

After all, why bother trying to crack a computer’s defences by force when you can just trick someone into willingly giving away their online banking credentials?

This kind of confidence trick lies at the heart of all scams, online or otherwise, and knowing how to spot them is the best way to avoid falling for it.

Read on to find out more about the 10 most common computer scams and learn how to avoid them.

Cold-call cons
Paying someone to fix a non-existent fault is one of the oldest tricks in the book. For computer users, the scam often starts with an unsolicited phone call from someone claiming to be from a technical support company.

After a vague description of a generic problem, the drill is for the smooth-tongued technician to direct you to a web page, where a remote control session can then be initiated. This is usually www.logmein123.com – a legitimate remote control technical support site that is being misused for criminal purposes.

With full access to your PC, the remote scammer can pretend to fix problems, fabricate new ones and install malicious software. The unsuspecting victim is required to pay for this privilege, and may even be offered the chance to cough up an annual subscription for keeping the computer ‘safe’ for a fault-free future.

Cold calls about your PC from companies you have never dealt with should set off alarm bells immediately – not least since the technology to detect a problem on your PC, over the internet, without your knowledge, does not exist.

Regardless of how accurate the caller’s assessment of your PC’s problems is (they do sometimes guess lucky), treat such offers of help like you would any unsolicited sales call – just hang up the phone.

Danger! Click to scan disk
Fake on-screen safety alerts are another way to fool PC users into thinking they have a fault. These typically appear while web browsing, when a visit to a site (often as the result of a mistyped web address or masked link) produces a pop-up warning of a virus or spyware infection.

Welcome to the world of ‘scareware’, where PC users are duped into installing convincing-looking malicious software that manufactures ‘problems’ in order to extract payment for equally fictitious fixes.

In a 12-month period ending in June 2009, security vendor Symantec received reports of 43 million failed scareware installation attempts worldwide – which makes you wonder how many were actually successful.

Assuming you have up-to-date anti-virus, spyware and firewall software in place, the best safeguard against scareware is common sense. In other words, don’t trust a random website to warn you of a problem that your trusted tools have missed.

Using the most recent version of your web browser is also a good idea – Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Google Chrome and Safari 5 will all attempt to block known malicious software sites, and will draw attention to web addresses that attempt to mask their true location.