There are many scams out there on the internet, and criminals do come up with new ideas everyday. However, many scams are rehashed, and this article contains 4 of the most common scams on the internet to steal your identity or money.

• Online Auction Scam - With the advent of eBay, this scam really took off. You win an auction on a site like eBay and send off your money. Unfortunately you receive a fake or, even worse, nothing at all! Luckily, eBay has improved things with their seller ratings and with buyer protection measures.

• Phishing Scam - A phishing scam involves a criminal sending out a fraudulent email, purporting to be from a banking or other financial institution that you may be a member of. The emails look very authentic and there are often links in the email to a fraudulent site that looks exactly like the legitimate site. They will generally ask you to “verify” account information, hoping you click on their link and fill in your details so that they can steal your identity. The latest one is from eBay, whereby you get an email stating you have bought a product that you haven’t purchased; the idea being that you click on their link to log in and say it wasn’t you. Either way, if you click on a link in these emails they have stolen your log in details.

• Nigerian Letter Scam - This involves someone purporting to be an important person with access to a lot of money and they want to give you some. All you have to do is give them your bank account details and license number amongst other things and help them move millions out of there home country, and they just want to use your bank account to hold the money for a little while.

• Lottery Scam - You may have won millions, or something as small as an LCD television. All you have to do is go to a website, or respond to an email, with your credit card details to pay for postage and handling. There goes your credit card details. There are a lot of scams out there, but most of them are similar to those mentioned above. The most important piece of advice you can be given is- if it is too good to be true, it probably is! Be safe!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Credit Card Theft and Fraud, Email Scams, Identity Theft, Internet Scams, LifeLock, Phishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.