INTERNET SCAM: Exposing their mode of operation to steemians.

You never know who is behind the screen...be careful
This is my entry to a scam contest organised by @swissclive. I already told a story of how I was scammed as a kid but now I want to lay bare how a friend of mine who is into internet scam operates in a bid to help everyone who will be reading this avoid being scammed. Scamming is a wrong act. Stealing from people who have worked so hard to put food on their table is so wrong and I will never be a party to it. I will expose scam wherever I see it.

SAY NO TO SCAM…

MY STORY

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I met a friend back when I was still in the university. He was a very smart guy and since I am sapiosexual, I get attached to smart people and we became really close friends. I loved his ability to solve critical analytical problems and I always envied his intelligence but he had one problem. He was never serious in school and always skipped classes. He would always tell me that education wouldn’t give him the kind of money he wanted in life and so he resorted to internet scam.

He lived in a hostel where 80% of the guy there were internet scammers. He saw the kind of lavish lifestyle they lived and decided that he was gonna be like them. I warned him against it but he was stubborn enough not to listen to me and I couldn’t persuade him much, so I left him.

He started and it was going quite well with him. Soon he started wearing pretty expensive clothes and accessories. He bought a car and even started building a house in his home town. I was particularly amazed and at some point was even tempted to join him but morality wouldn’t let me. Mama raised me better than that but I was damn inquisitive so I feigned interest.

I told him I was ready and wanted to learn the art of internet scam and as a very good friend that he was to me, he decided to lay it bare to me, telling me how he operated and how he was able to make that much in just 3 months.

He told me that the internet scam he did was of two types. One was through Facebook dating and the other was through Alibaba. Facebook dating basically dealt with deceiving unsuspecting young and old female foreigners into thinking they have found love in a different country. While Alibaba dealt with Email cloning. A process whereby the victims email password would be stolen and his email operated without his knowledge there by diverting the funds of the victim if he is a business man. I will explain both in detail.

I told my friend that I wanted to learn the Facebook dating scam first since it was easier to do than Alibaba and he told me to first of all open a new Facebook account which I did. He asked me to source for pictures of unpopular Americans online as using the picture of a popular American as my profile picture could jeopardize the whole process and my account could be blocked. I found this quite difficult doing so since he was already into it and new everything about Facebook dating, he helped me source for the pictures.

After that, he asked me do download an online application called VPN( Virtual Proxy Network), this application helps to hide the identity and location of the scammer. If the scammer if from a country in Africa, the application would show the scammers location to be the United States and so the victim can never find out who she is really dealing with.

This was the stage I was in when I totally lost interest because I was disgusted in the fact that it didn’t really take much to steal from people who have worked so hard.

Getting the application activated was the last phase before the actual scam begins. The scam starts when a friend request is sent from that account and an unsuspecting victim accepts such malicious friend request. The scammer would start up a conversation and the rest would be history. The scammer might pose as a very wealthy man or a sexy fitness trainer, who wouldn’t fall for these two? And that’s how the victims end up being scammed.

Now to Alibaba…

Alibaba is a popular platform where business men and women go to advertise their products and so they put out their email addresses for easy access by anyone interested in buying their products.

Now what these scammers do is, they get an application (Can’t remember the name), which extracts email addresses from this site (Alibaba) and when they are done with extracting lots of email addresses, they clone them by sending phishing sites to these emails and once the owner of the email logs in, they get his phone number and email password and that’s it.

With the email password of the business man, they can now monitor his sales and deliveries and once they see that a client is interested in his product through the mails sent, they get the email first and re-write the email ad before the client get the reply to the email, they re-write it again and so the scammers basically act like the middle men in the transaction and when it is tie for the business man to send his account details, the scammers would change the account details to their and fund transfer would be made to the account of the scammer and not the business man who wants to get his product sold.

I am sure you are shocked right now. Well, that was how shocked I was when I was listening to him say all these.

We stopped being friends after that day as I couldn’t not look at his face anymore. I was ashamed of him for living off sweat of others and that has informed my decision to let this out today and to let the world know how these evil scammers operate in order to prevent people from falling victim. I hope this goes out to a lot of steemians and I hope this post gets a lot of views.

Thanks for reading…say NO to online Scam!