How to Avoid Getting Scammed Online and Becoming Another Victim

With the advent of the Internet we are seeing scams rise and proliferate faster than the increase in healthcare costs. From identity theft scams to scams that just exists to take your money they are everywhere and the odds are you'll be contacted by at least one every day in your email or some other method or fashion ( according to the FBI and numerous police agencies the amount of scams out there averages one per person right now). So how is one to avoid being taken in by all these scams?

First, when you are looking through your emails if you see something that doesn't look right it probably is a scam. This is the most prevalent area scammers and fraudsters hit is email. This is because they know it's a numbers game and the more people they contact with their scam or fraud for more victims they will find. So by using email they can easily go and communicate with millions of people and find thousands of victims. So the number one way to stop scams is to delete out and spam marked anything that looks like spam.

When you see a Nigerian scam that comes in to your email and says you have been found to be the sole heir to someone from Libya or Nigeria was an engineer and left you $3 million dollars or more and they want your information to contact you on this, use your head. If someone really did die and leave that time I do not contact you through your email. Usually a real attorney or one of their assistance would contact you through the mail on real letter head from the attorneys office and they'll be asking you to come in and see them and it would go over this with you. No real attorney would contact you initially through your email.

If you get an email from a bank or stock trading company that looks legitimate look at the link that they send you it looked at the web address. Does it say HTTP or HTTPS. The real bank login or stock trading login will be HTTPS which indicates a secure website. Fraudsters are good at making their own versions look exactly like the original bank website but they cannot do the conversion of an HTTP to an HTTPS secure website. So this should himself be a dead giveaway. Also if you see the website like your bank asking you for something through an email like your security number, account numbers, etc., no bank will do this.

Another way to avoid being defrauded or scammed is to stick with good solid websites like Amazon. It's big on customer service and satisfaction and has a very, very good track record with customers. Ebay on the other hand, has a very high fraud or scam incidence (per the FBI, eBay fraud can be as high as 50 percent of all transactions on Ebay. That means basically one out of every two transactions done through eBay has some sort of fraud involved in it).

Another place to be very wary of is Craigslist. Craigslist is very high with spam and scam content on there. Basically if a business lists an add and they are not local to you then they are most likely a scam, Craigslist themselves will tell you that they are a 100 percent scam. Only do business with people with a local phone number and that are local to you. While we're at it another place full of scams is Twitter. Nine out of every 10 posts on twitter (or tweets as users on twitter refer to them as) is a spam message with a link to a scam website or similar. Just login to twitter and look at the messages you receive under your own user profile. Depending on who you add for followers pretty much every message could be spam and scams.

Basically, to avoid scams you must use your due diligence in checking the facts. Especially before you ever decide to purchase or provide critical financial information like your social security number, bank account numbers, etc. If something sounds too good to be true, especially if it's in an email, it almost always is, so be sure to use an email provider like Yahoo mail that has good antispam and antiscam properties. And one more hint of advice, if you are watching an infomercial featured late at night, unless it's for a physical product, the item you are watching and may be purchasing is most likely a scam. Case in point, be very careful of infomercials selling real estate investment advice and or seminars as 99.99 percent of the self-proclaimed real estate gurus are complete scams and make all their money or most of it off of their seminars and not off of real estate as they claim to.

So use your head, delete emails that are either spammy or scammy in nature, get a good email provider that has plenty of antispam and antiscam features, and don't fall for claims of instant wealth and other similar claims which are almost always associated with a scam of some sort. Do your due diligence and check into these things and be sure and use a good website for online purchase like Amazon (as your risks of being scammed is far lower than that of using a website like eBay or craigslist).