Crimes Which the Internet Has Made Possible It seems as if the invention of the internet, a really great and useful invention by the way as most people will attest to has given rise to criminal activities, because it has made it easier to reach more people and sometimes crime is a numbers game depending on what type of crime we are talking about. Let me explain, salesman pitching a product by phone usually can expect a certain number of people to buy the product for every certain amount of calls. In the old days, before the internet, encyclopedia salesmen used to get leads by calling people on the phone and they knew for every one hundred people who answered the phone they would get between 3 to 5 appointments to demonstrate the product which meant they would get about 2 sales or more. Today these same principles apply although the number will be different, but the job is easier. It is easy to send out emails in bulk to hundreds of thousands of people telling them they inherited money and all they have to do is send a deposit to get the ball rolling. While the fact anyone might fall for this scheme might sound incredible, we have to remember some people are old and others not as sharp to pick up on this. This is the market these crooks are trying to reach. They are sure to get some people, because of the vast amount of emails that go out. They probably even know the amount of emails they have to send to get one person. As technology has advanced for us, it has also advanced for the criminal element. One thing I have talked about before is how government agencies and companies collect our data, including social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank accounts and other important information and then fail to protect it, because they know if they lose it nothing will be done to them. It seems like a joke to me when we hear people telling us how to protect our information when so much of it is in the hands of others who don’t protect it. Some companies didn’t even have our data password protected which is the very minimum amount of protection which can be offered and the data is not encrypted so it is there for everyone to see. How does one protected themselves when companies which we never authorized to collect our information, who collect it and don’t properly protect it like Experian which lost the data on over a hundred million people? Criminals love credit cards and you can imagine with over a hundred million accounts stolen and the average person having several credit cards how happy the criminals are now. They probably have access to over 400,000,000 credit card accounts. There are a lot of crimes which the internet has made easier to perform. One crime which has been going on since time immemorial is blackmail. One might ask, how does the internet make this easier and it would be a valid question and it has a valid answer. There is something called key logging software. Criminals send this out by poisoning software on websites you use or software you download. Once this installs itself onto your computer the criminals know everything you write, everyone you contact and everywhere you go. If the goal is to blackmail you the criminals would like nothing better than to catch someone cheating on their spouse, a person with a lot of money using child pornography or some such thing. It could even be political blackmail of some kind. In another kind of scheme your bank accounts are stolen if you use your computer for banking. Then there is the software which completely takes over your computer and lets criminals use your computer for criminal activities. We can thank the internet for this type of crime. One scheme which the internet has made possible is the fraudulent web site. There are a few different types. One type is a merchandise web site offering very low prices for products. It is designed to get your attention and have you tell others about the incredible buys it is advertising. Think of it this way, who wouldn’t want to save a few hundred dollars on a television or get an IPhone for 50% off? There is only one problem with this type of site, they have nothing to sell so what happens is nothing gets delivered. When you try and do something about it you generally find the site is in some country that prevents this. Another type of fraudulent website is the one which is created to look like one you usually go to, such as a bank website. It looks exactly the same and comes up in place of the real one and asks you for your id and password and sometimes even makes you believe you carried out a transaction when really nothing happened except for your account getting stolen and emptied. One thing none of us would have ever thought about years ago were web sites which facilitate terrorism, yet there are plenty of them. When terror attacks occur, quite frequently we find out the person who conducted them had been frequenting a terrorist website. These sites brain wash the people going to them and convince some of them that killing in the name of religion is something God wants them to do. It is hard to believe people would believe this, but there are those who do as evidenced by the killings going on lately. These sites are said to be watched by our security agencies, but it doesn’t seem to prevent all of the attacks by people who have gone on them. Another crime takes place when a criminal goes to a website and changes it content. It might be done just for the fun of it, or else it could be done to cost a company or individual money or ruin their reputation. I heard of one company’s site having their prices lowered to one or two percent of normal and they experienced a flood of people trying to buy the items and some were angry and vowed to never shop there again when they didn’t get what they wanted. Yes, the internet is great and it allows us to interact socially with people who could be thousands of miles away, but unfortunately it is a double-edged sword and stricter laws have to be enacted to protect our data and treaties need to be signed to punish any criminal who uses it to take advantage of other people. |
