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Your online contributions to support tsunami-hit victims in Japan could go into the coffers of scamsters if you are not careful.
A torrent of scam solicitations for fake charities has flood the World Wide Web ever since an earthquake stuck Japan last Friday. Cyber security companies say that hundreds of charity scam sites, which generally use desperate messages in ungrammatical English, have mushroomed in the last two days.
“One site that proved be a scam appeared just two hours after the Japan earthquake. This is a record of sorts as we have seen such Web sites mushrooming probably a day or two after such tragedies in the past,” said Mr Vinoo Thomas, Technical Product Manager of McAfee Labs.
E-mails marked ‘URGENT', requesting for help by appealing ‘to the humanity in every Internet user', or urging consumers around the world to offer donations to those affected, are doing the rounds. Cyber security company Symantec observed more than 50 domains with the names of either “Japan tsunami” or “Japan earthquake” few hours after the natural disaster.
Another popular method used by the cyber mafia is to poison search engine results. “With several Internet users searching for earthquake-related news and information online, cyber criminals can poison search results for malicious Websites to appear at the top of the results. Users who click on these links assuming that the information will help them make sense of the tragedy, may end up downloading malware instead,” said Mr Shantanu Ghosh, Vice-President, India Product Operations, Symantec.
How does one distinguish between fraudulent and genuine charity sites?
Basic tips such as checking the URL of the site before clicking, not clicking on suspicious links in e-mail messages and typing the domain name of the site in the browser's address bar than following any link to avoid online scams, will help in this regard.
“When it comes to donations, it is best to stick to some of the internationally reputed philanthropy organisation rather than going in for relative unknown entities,” said Mr Thomas.
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