Avoiding online scams
Everyday there are thousands of people fall into the hands of online scammers and if you are not well informed, you might become one of them one day. Be warned and be careful! Online scams comes in many forms and you may not know when and how will it get you. Here are the common forms of online scams:
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Selling Products – This is the most common form of online scam. It is easy to see if the product being sold is a scam or not. Here are the obvious indications:
- Price is too good to be true – online scammers always sell their products with very attractive and irresistible price. If the price is way lower than the average market price, there’s a big chance that it is a scam.
- Asking for Downpayment – beware for seller asking for downpayment before your meet-up. He/she may runaway after you gave the downpayment.
- No Meetup – scammers don’t usually do meet-ups because they want to hide something. Meet-ups is always a better option to avoid scam.
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Emails – emails are best friend of hackers and scammers, this is their easiest and fastest way to get into your bank account, credit card and other online accounts. There are many ways on how they do it but they all have one thing in common, they all have a suspicious links or attachments.
The image above is from wespac showing how an email was use to scam. Always take note of 2 things, the email address of the sender should match the company it is representing. For example if the email is from BPI, the email address should also be a BPI email and not from gmail, yahoo,etc. Second, the link should also match the website of the legit company, if the link is different- don’t ever try to click.