The West's Wild Internet

by: Kenneth J. McCormick

By
Kenneth J. McCormick
Webmaster
Http://Aboutfacts.net


In the old days, in what has become known as the Wild West, there were people who would try and
sell you 'medicine' that could not only cure any ailment you had, and it could also be used as
paint remover, furniture polish and clear your pipes. They would put on a little show first and
this was the medicine show. After the show was finished they would hawk the bottles of 'medicine'
to the audience. There were also other scams that were perpetrated upon the uneducated and not so
uneducated settlers like selling them phony gold mines. The sellers would go out and toss a few
gold nuggets around the mine for the unsuspecting prospective buyers to see. This was called
salting the mine. Then there was the less sophisticated approach of getting a miner drunk and just
stealing any gold he had. The law was hard to find and many places had no law at all.


Boy its a lucky thing that this kind of stuff doesn't happen any more and we have laws to protect
us. But is this really true? I am afraid not, not all of it anyway. Welcome to the Wild Internet.
There are so many scams out there that we would have to classify them by type. Here are a few
types:


1. Electronic Bunko
2. Invasion
3. Electronic Deception
4. Destruction


Electronic Bunko is pretty simple. You get an email that states that the author of the mail was
given your name as someone that can be trusted. It goes on to say that he is either a member of a
royal family of some country, or a cabinet member, or a person in high authority of some
institution. He says that someone, usually a deposed ruler has money in off shore banks. The
amount is usually stated as something like $20,000,000 or so. He has a problem and that is he is
being watched and can't withdraw the money. But since your name was given to him as an honest
person, if you withdraw the funds, you either get to keep 1/3 rd or 1/2. As the scheme progresses
they will need some sort of good faith money but they tell you not to worry because they will hold
it for you. I hate to say this but you wonder how any person can fall for such bull? Apparently
this scam must work because they send out millions of these emails and I am sure that they
wouldn't waste their time if some people weren't biting. Another of these scams looks a little
more legit at first. They offer to buy something you are selling and tell you that they have an
agent in London and the items will be exported to Nigeria. So far so good. The next thing that
happens is they tell you that they are owed money by someone else and he is going to pay the bill
for them with a check but it will be for the amount they are owed. This amount is always much more
than the purchase price. They go on to say that they know you are honest and will send them the
change and you don't have to wait for the check to clear because it is good. If you are greedy and
don't send the change but send the merchandise they don't care because the check is a forgery.
They are hoping that is exactly what you do rather than wait for the check to clear.


Invasion is a little more technical. I am sure that everyone has heard of computer viruses. A
program is written and attached to some email or download or is even sent to your computer from
some website you visited. It hides itself somewhere on one of your hard drives and just watches
everything you type. Unfortunately for you this includes passwords, addresses and just about
anything else. That this wouldn't do anyone much good except for the other thing it does. It sends
the information, periodically, back over the internet to the creator of the malicious program.He
even gets all the names and addresses of your friend and contacts because this program probably
reads you email lists also.


Electronic Deception. There are at least two kinds of electronic deception that come to my mind.
They are both dangerous but the most dangerous of the two is webroot. A program goes onto your
computer and then hides itself. It intercepts all outgoing data and if it sees that its size or
name is going to be listed, it hides this info so that you can't tell it is there. It can't be
detected by anti virus programs or any other detection software yet, except for a very special
program available from Microsoft called Root Kit Revealer which checks every storage device on
your computer or by the Blacklight Rootkit Eliminator which looks in the directories that it
thinks that it is most likely to be in. The program has hundreds of phony links to counterfeit
sites that look just like the real thing. If you bank online for example, you will be sent to a
site that looks exactly like your bank site and once you type in your id and password, you are
dead. Your bank account is emptied almost immediately. Even if your bank has safeguards to prove
its the legitimate site, they usually show after you type in your info and then its too late. This
is so bad, it could end all electronic transactions. Its sad really, we now have the chance for
convenience that was not even dreamed of a few years ago but criminals all over the world seem to
be operating with impunity on the wild internet. The second deception involves email. You are sent
an email that states that you have had some transaction on a site like PayPal or a banking site.
You think you will outsmart these guys if it is a fraud so you open your browser, type in the
address of PayPal or the bank in question, sign on and you see that the info you were given wasn't
true. You feel really good. What you don't realize is that you did exactly what was expected of
you. The email had a small program attached that read the address you typed into the browser then
read your id and password and sent them back to the author. Cleaned out again!


Both of these programs get on your computer in various ways. Email, Websites, Downloads etc. So
not only are these creeps ruining your ability to conduct your financial affairs online but they
are making you afraid to go to websites that you don't know, thus ruining your enjoyment of the
web.


Destruction. This really makes no sense to me because there is no monetary gain involved. This is
the passing of destructive viruses around the interned for the purpose of outdoing some other
virus author and destroying all the data on your machine. I myself get attacked about 2-3 times a
week and if it wasn't for my good virus protection I would be forever reformatting my hard drives.
Most attacks are email attacks but they certainly are not limited to that. Some of the viruses
contain juvenile messages that my virus is more powerful than yours or some such message. This
kind of program has been known to cause havoc and tremendous expense to many companies, not to
mention the heartache caused to private citizens.


From the perspective of the private person it seems that nothing is being done about the most
visible scams. They have been coming in emails for years now. I am referring to what I labeled as
Electronic Bunko. Even the messages haven't changed much in that time. I wonder if anyone in the
government, either on the highest level or in law enforcement even cares? They might, but no one
has shown that they do yet. If the easy stuff is running wild how can we expect anything to be
done about the more complicated issues of Electronic Deception or Destruction?


Yes folks the Wild West still lives, only now it is known as the West's Wild Internet and instead
of duping one person at a time, thousands of people are being ruined at once with malevolent
software applications.


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About the author:

Ken is the webmaster of Http://Aboutfacts.net
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