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Internet users are victims of various scams online. The goal of these scams is to steal your money or perform some criminal act using your identity. Millions of dollars have been lost because of these crimes, and despite law enforcement having organized many special units to combat this crime, it is still proliferating.
Some of the many types of online distribution of Internet fraud are:
Phishing E-mails; here, hundreds of thousands of emails are sent out using fraudulent email addresses. These usually ask for personal information you should not give out, but many people fall for it for various reasons. The result is usually identity theft.
Lottery scams: are emails with messages informing you that have made millions of dollars in an international lottery. The message usually tells you that your e-mail has been included among the winners by random drawing. To convince the victim, they are given links to real lotteries, or even documents or false ads that claim that the lottery was approved by well known companies such as Microsoft.
Nigerian Scams or the 419 scam: Popularly known as the Nigerian scam, it is one of the most pervasive and popular internet scams. It also uses e-mails with different versions of a story of some political leader who has been overthrown and possesses millions of dollars that need to be transferred. All you need to do to get that money is provide bank account information. Once you do that, your bank is robbed online.
One other popular scam involves sending you an interesting image or document as an attachment. This attachment contains a malicious code. When you open the attachment, the executable code gets downloaded into your computer. Unknown to you, it sits there and either records your every online movement and transmits them, or enslaves your computer and makes use of it for illegal purposes.