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Doctor Gets Preyed Upon With E-Mail Fraud

Last March (2010), practicing psychiatrist Dr. Yusuf Matcheswalla received one anxious telephone call from one of his friends. Actually, that friend had got an emergency electronic mail from Matcheswalla's e-mail account stating that when he was in South Africa on a business trip, thieves stole his wallet and owing to that, he urgently required cash so he could return home. The e-mail provided the number of one bank account as well where the writer said the money must be transferred.

Matcheswalla's pal who answered that e-mail got a reply in just a few hours. However, it sounded suspicious. He, meanwhile, rang up Matcheswalla too, and to the surprise of both persons, an attacker had hacked into Matcheswalla's Gmail account so he could dispatch a phony request e-mail to all the IDs in Matcheswalla's address book. The doctor reported the incident to the Mumbai (India) police; however, they're yet to trace the culprit.

Reveal experts that the case is one of the Nigerian online scam, which reportedly with its brilliant simplicity, has been dramatically flourishing over recent years.

Lately PandaLabs the anti-malware laboratory of Panda Security listed the most prevalent Internet frauds detected over the last ten years when it found the Nigerian online fraud as the topmost one on the basis of frequency and distribution. Incidentally, there're other names too given to the Nigerian scam viz. "419" or Advance Fee Fraud. Notably, the moniker, '419 scam' is derived from the Nigerian Criminal Code section, which references it.

Now, owing to such e-mail frauds, security researchers say that in case a user gets an e-mail which appears doubtful like an SOS electronic mail, which's suspicious, it is in all probability an online fraud from Nigeria. Thus recipients of e-mails such as the one in Matcheswalla's case would do good to call the person understood as requesting help before deciding to act.

Moreover, when such e-mails come to end-users, they must report the messages to the relevant officials within the cyber-crime handling department inside India that'll help the authorities not only to trace the perpetrators but also to assist victims in retrieving their stolen funds.

Related article: District Attorney Alerts of Scam E-Mails Titled ‘Breaking News’

» SPAMfighter News - 9/30/2010

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