Internet fraud is a type of cybercrime or deception that uses the Internet. It could involve hiding information or giving out wrong information to get money, property, or an inheritance from a victim. Internet fraud is not a single, distinct crime. Instead, it includes many illegal and wrong things that people do in cyberspace.
However, it is not the same as theft because the victim voluntarily and on purpose gives the information, money, or property to the thief. It is also different because the offenders are in other places and at other times.
The FBI’s 2017 Internet Crime Report says that about 300,000 complaints were sent to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). In 2017, people were scammed online and lost more than $1.4 billion. According to a study done by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and McAfee, cybercrime costs the global economy as much as $600 billion, which is 0.8% of the total global GDP.
There are many kinds of online fraud. It includes things like spam emails and online scams. Internet fraud can happen even if it is only partly based on using Internet services or if it is based primarily or entirely on using the Internet.
Charity Fraud
The con artist pretends to be a charity that needs money to help people who have been hurt by a natural disaster, terrorist attack (like the 9/11 attacks), regional conflict, or epidemic. Charity scams were common after Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami. Other scam charities claim to be raising money for cancer, AIDS, or Ebola virus research, children’s orphanages (the scammer pretends to work for the orphanage or a non-profit associated with it), or charities like the Red Cross or United Way.
There have been times when the people who started the charity pulled scams in the past few years. Wafa Abboud, who runs the Long Island Charity, is a recent example. Abboud was found to have stolen about $900,000 worth of money. She was accused of stealing from a bank, laundering money, and fraud. Scammers will use a wide range of tricks. First, they’ll ask for donations, and they’ll often link to online news stories to back up their story about a fund drive. People who give money to scammers think they are helping a good cause and don’t expect anything.
Once the money is sent, it’s gone, and the scammer usually goes away, but some try to keep the scam going by asking for more payments. When victims deduct their supposed donations from their income taxes, they may get in trouble with the law. U.S. tax law says that donations to a qualified non-profit organization are the only ones that can be written off. The scammer may tell the victim that their donation is tax-deductible and give them all the necessary proof of donation.
However, the information provided by the scammer is false, and if the victim is audited, they will face harsh penalties because of the fraud. Even though these scams have some of the highest success rates, especially after a major disaster, and are used by con artists worldwide, the average loss per victim is less than with other fraud schemes. This is because, unlike in most scams, the victim is much less likely to take out a loan to give money or give more than they can afford.
Internet ticket Scam
Internet marketing fraud involves selling tickets to popular events like concerts, shows, and sports games. The tickets are either fake, or they are never sent. This kind of fraud has grown because there are more online ticket agencies and more experienced and dishonest ticket resellers. Though they may be based in other countries, many of these scams are run by ticket touts from Britain.
The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games ticket scam, run by a company called “Xclusive Leisure and Hospitality” and sold through a website called “Beijing 2008 Ticketing,” was a good example.
On August 4, it was said that fake tickets worth more than A$50 million had been sold through the site. On August 6, it was said that Terance Shepherd, a British ticket broker, was behind the scam, which took place outside of China. Online gift card fraud
As retailers and other businesses worry more and more about what they can do to stop people from using stolen credit card numbers to buy gift cards, cybercriminals have been focusing more and more on taking advantage of fake gift cards.
More specifically, hackers with bad intentions have been trying to get their hands on information about gift cards that have been given out but not yet used. Some of the ways that gift card data can be stolen are through automated bots that launch brute-force attacks on the systems that store them at retailers. First, hackers steal gift card information. Then, they use a retailer’s online service to check the balance and try to use the money to buy goods or sell them on a third-party website.
When gift cards are dealt with again, the thieves take the remaining balance in cash, which can also be used to launder money. This hurts the gift card experience for customers and how people think of the store’s brand. It can also cost the store thousands of dollars in sales. Gift card fraud can also happen when someone steals a person’s credit card information and uses it to buy brand-new gift cards.
Social media and fraud
People tend to share more personal information on their social networking profiles, such as their birthday, email address, home town, and relationship status.
Fraudsters could use this personally identifiable information to steal people’s identities, and putting it on social media makes it much easier for them to do so.
The problem of trustworthiness in online reviews has been around for a long time and won’t go away. In 2004, Amazon’s Canadian site accidentally revealed the real names of thousands of U.S. book reviewers who had been anonymous up until that point.
The mistake showed that many authors used fake names to write good reviews of their books. Also, 72 per cent say that positive reviews make them trust a business more, and 88 per cent say that in “the right circumstances,” they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Scammers are taking advantage of the power of social media more and more to do illegal things. Still, intelligent risk managers and their insurance companies are also finding ways to use information from social media to fight insurance fraud.
For example, a worker who was hurt and out of work because of a worker’s compensation claim couldn’t help but join a local semi-professional sports team and play a contact sport. Investigators used social media and the Internet to discover that the worker was on the team roster and playing very well.
The local police say that a “romance fraud” took place online with a woman from the U.K. The woman in her 50s has lost an inheritance from her parents worth £320,000. After the loss, her parents disowned her.
After the victim’s husband died in 2019, the person who hurt her pretended to be Tim and met her on a dating site. First, he took £68,000 under the guise of customs fees. Then, he asked her to pay £200,000 directly to his translator to secure his contractors and store his equipment.
We have all seen substantial political and financial scams and frauds in our country for many years now, involving money that adds up to millions of dollars. And these are just the ones that have been found out. So let’s not even talk about the ones that haven’t been found out yet.
With so much money, it’s hard not to wonder if India would still be a developing country if this money had been used for what it was supposed to be used for.
Here is a list of the TOP 10 biggest cons in our country in recent years.
1. 2G SPECTRUM SCAM
What else can be said about this scam that hasn’t already been said? Recently, the Supreme Court noted that the spectrum scam made “all other scams look bad.” The CAG indicted former telecom minister A Raja in the 2G spectrum scam, which caused the national exchequer to lose about 176,000 core. Raja was forced to resign as a result of this.
The scandal is about claims that there were mistakes in how the telecom ministry gave wireless radio spectrum and licenses to private operators, some of whom were not eligible. Spectrum allocation and assignments were done at low prices (from 2001 in the year 2008), which cost the government considerable money.
2. COMMONWEALTH GAMES SCAM
Yes, of course, how could the con artists miss the Common Wealth Games, which India hosted in 2010 and was much talked about? Even before the long-awaited sporting extravaganza could start, it was surrounded by accusations of corruption. Estimates say that the scam cost close to 35,000 crores.
It involved paying money to people who didn’t exist, willfully delaying the completion of contracts, overcharging for equipment bought through tendering, and making mistakes when buying equipment. Money was also stolen. Suresh Kalmadi, the former head of the Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee, was charged and sent to jail by the CBI in April 2011.
3. SCAM AT TELGI
The name Abdul Karim Telgi is still evident in the minds of everyone in India. The con artist, who shocked the whole country with his skill at making fake stamp papers, was a master forger. According to estimates, the scam happened in 12 states and was worth more than 20,000 crores. With help from many government departments, this scam was one of the first to show how politicians and bureaucrats were both corrupting the system.
4. SATYAM SCAM
The Satyam scam, which cost 14,000 crores, is the biggest fraud in the Indian business world. Ramalinga Raju, Satyam’s disgraced former chairman, is accused of cooking the books for several years and inflating the company’s sales and profits. First, he tried to fill the “fake assets with real ones” by buying Maytas, but it didn’t work, so he decided to tell the truth. As a result, the market capitalization of India’s fourth-largest IT company dropped by a shocking Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) in a single day as investors quickly dumped shares, sending the scrip down by 78% to Rs 39.95 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.
5. IPL SCAM
There was never been a time when so many Indians enjoyed and celebrated a scam. People have said that a lot of what the IPL does is unethical, illegal, or both. People say that politicians and others use Mauritius and other tax havens to hide the identities of investors by using shell companies and fake names.
There are rumours that matches and bids for team franchises have been fixed and that there have been bribes, tax evasion, illegal betting, and breaking of foreign investment rules. Lalit Modi, the founder and chairman of the IPL and a former vice president of the political Board of Control for Cricket in India, was at the centre of both the growth and the controversy (BCCI).
6. BOFORS SCAM
People say that the Bofors scandal is the best example of Indian corruption. In the 1980s, the then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and others, including a powerful NRI family called the Hindujas, were accused of getting kickbacks from Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India’s 155 mm field howitzer. Swedish State Radio had aired a shocking story about an undercover operation by Bofors, Sweden’s biggest arms manufacturer. As a result, PM Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party members were allegedly given $16 million.
7. HARSHAD MEHTA SCAM
Harshad Mehta, known as the “Big Bull,” took advantage of flaws in the banking system and caused the Bombay Stock Exchange to rise in 1992 by trading shares at a premium in many different segments. Between April 1991 and May 1992, he and his friends took about Rs 5,000 crore (Rs 50 billion) from banks and gave it to stockbrokers. In the end, he was charged with 72 crimes.
8. COBBLER SCAM
In 1995, another large-scale scam was found. Sohin Daya, who worked for Dawood Shoes, Rafique Tejani, who worked for Metro Shoes, and Kishore Signapurkar, who worked for Milano Shoes, were all arrested in this multi-crore shoe scam. They were accused of borrowing crores of rupees on behalf of fake leather co-operative societies and using these loans to make money through different schemes. There were also charges against people who worked for foreign state banks.
9. FODDER SCAM
This scam, often called “Chara Ghotala,” was worth a whopping 900 crore rupees and involved the famous and infamous Bihar politician Lalu Prasad Yadav. The fraud involved making up “vast herds of made-up livestock” for which food, medicine, and equipment for taking care of animals were supposedly bought.
10. HAWALA SCANDAL
In 1996, there was yet another bribery scandal that got much attention. It involved payments of $18 million made through hawala brokers to the country’s top politicians. Lal Krishna Advani, who was the leader of the opposition, was one of the people who were charged. People were shocked when it was said that all of the major political players had taken bribes and had connections to payments sent to Hizbul Mujahideen militants in Kashmir.
Conclusion:
Internet fraud is a type of cybercrime or deception that uses the Internet. In 2017, people were scammed online and lost more than $1.4 billion. Scammers will use various tricks to trick victims into thinking they are helping a good cause. The FBI’s 2017 Internet Crime Report says that about 300,000 complaints were sent to the Internet Crime Complaint Center. Internet marketing fraud involves selling tickets to popular events like concerts, shows, and sports games.
U.S. tax law says that donations to a qualified non-profit organization are the only ones that can be written off. The scammer may tell the victim that their donation is tax-deductible and give all the necessary proof of donation. Hackers have been trying to get their hands on information about gift cards that have been given out but not yet used. Gift card data can be stolen through automated bots that launch brute-force attacks on the systems that store them at retailers. In addition, scammers are taking advantage of social media more and more to do illegal things, such as identity theft and insurance fraud.
What else can be said about this scam that hasn’t already been said? Abdul Karim Telgi, the master forger, was one of the first to show how politicians and bureaucrats were corrupting the system. Satyam scam, which cost 14,000 crores, is the biggest fraud in the Indian business world. Lalit Modi, the founder and chairman of the IPL, was at the centre of both the growth and the controversy. Harshad Mehta, known as the “Big Bull,” caused the Bombay Stock Exchange to rise in 1992 by trading shares at a premium in many different segments.
Rajiv Gandhi and others, including a powerful NRI family, were accused of getting kickbacks from Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India’s 155 mm field howitzer. Lal Krishna Advani, the opposition leader, was one of the people who were charged in this multi-crore scam.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
