Talk:Internet fraud/Archives/2013

Copyleft violation
Content literally lifted without attribution on a link farm site: ww.fraudwatchernetwork.com/website/internet-fraud.html JavaWoman 04:52, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I am sick and tired of users like JavaWoman. The linkfarm or whatever COPIED from this article.  I am sure of this because I WROTE THIS FROM SCRATCH.  I used some knowledge that no linkfarm could have known about.  Why do you assume that Wikipedians copy from others and not the other way around?  Or maybe is it that JavaWoman has some economic incentive on putting links on Wikipedia to some Adsense generating sites??? --AAAAA 03:37, 28 September 2005 (UTC)—

Pump & Dump
Most would agree that the pump and dump "scam" is immoral and socially manipulative but is it technically illegal? All well.


 * Yes, it is illegal. HairyWombat 02:19, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Merge with Internet crime
These two articles seem largely repetitive. Internet crime is a possible POV fork which is not wikified and contains a lot of non-notable or non-verifiable crap. Savidan 03:30, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Hey Savidan this is an assignment from a college profesor and my topic was Internet Crime, I beleive I made an adequate effort to talk about the crimes and not just the fraud. Please reconsider. SturgBurg15 13 Feb 2006

I'll remove the notice and because it looks like the article has improved, but this should only disucss non-fraud crimes. The original was almost entirely repetitive. Savidan 05:13, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Direct Solicitation section
This section doesn't really explain how this scam works:
 * The most straightforward type of purchase scam is a buyer in another country approaching many merchants through spamming them and directly asking them if they can ship to them using credit cards to pay.
 * Most likely, a few weeks or months after the merchant ships and charges the Nigerian credit card, he/she will be hit with a chargeback from the credit card processor and lose all the money.

Why doesn't the company check the credit card, like ever other company does? Why is thhe email necessary, and what does it achieve? I'm quite confused. 199 (talk)  17:09, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Source for one of the facts
"The FBI and police agencies worldwide have people assigned to combat this type of fraud; according to figures from the FBI, U.S. companies' losses due to Internet fraud in 2003 surpassed US$500 million."
 * AAAAA, would you be so kind as to give me the source of below fact about internet fraud cost to US companies:
 * This number was given to me over the phone sometime by an FBI agent that was in charge of a certain type of fraud.--AAAAA 05:02, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Nanny scam
Dear Hue12. Thank you for your warning. I was not using Wikipedia to advertise and I re-edited the page because I though I had made a mistake in saving it the first time. Au pair & nanny scams are becoming a big problem and the worst off victims are the poorest who fall for the " we can get you a visa " scam. So I think that attempting to make people more aware and guiding them is important. Why would I actually draw attention to this fact which could put people off using nanny matching sites like mine?

nanny Damian Kirkwood —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.149.3.200 (talk) 19:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC).


 * Noted. You should avoid linking to a website that you own, maintain or represent, even if the guidelines otherwise imply that it should be linked. see Advertising and conflicts of interest guidelines. If you have content to contribute, contribute that. Don't simply direct readers to another site for the useful facts; add useful facts to the article, then cite the site where you found them. You're here to improve Wikipedia -- not just to funnel readers off Wikipedia and onto some other site, right? --Hu12 19:25, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you Hue12. What about the external link www. autoshippers. co. uk/car_shipping_scam.htm. That actually has Google adverts on it!! and the other external links, they "funnel" readers away. Anyway when I have the time I will add the whole article to Wikipedia.

Damian Kirkwood

Removed unsourced info / personal experience
Removed this section from click fraud "One recent experience resulted in the discovery that this fraudster's website had 176,000 pages, all with the same or very similar pages, they keywords included the days of the week and the months of the year, but nothing to do with any business except the fraudsters details. The experience resulted in the loss of £950 english pounds equivalent to US$1860." Tazzy531 14:36, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Lots o' scam e-mails
Do there really need to be this many full-text examples of scam e-mails? Although I find them hilarious, they make the article pretty dang long and there are LOTS of examples of these available on other sites; maybe we should link? e v i l d e a t h m a t h 18:08, 23 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree - at least these should be broken out to another page ? -- Beardo (talk) 14:50, 18 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Definitely agree; added example-farm tag, because it's pretty darn bad. I don't think Wikipedia needs to be an encyclopedic reference of every scam e-mail ever received... aren't there already sites that do that?  Better to provide one good exemplar, and give a description of the salient features for each type of e-mail. Macwhiz (talk) 04:19, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Repeated removal of Israel
In the last couple days, there have been repeated edits to the "Geographic Sources" section removing Israel from the list of countries (cited from ). The cited source states "According to a ClearCommerce® survey, the top 12 international sources for online fraud are Ukraine, Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Egypt, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Russia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Israel."; I'm failing to see anything that indicates that Israel should be removed from the Wikipedia entry. e v i l d e a t h m a t h 13:37, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Pharming vs. domain hijacking and defacement
In the pharming section, the example of Hushmail seems to be out of place. Phishing is domain hijacking for the purposes of obtaining personal information by deceiving the user. From the (uncited) example, the Hushmail attack was domain hijacking not to deceive the user into revealing personal information, but to deceive the user into believing the site had been defaced. Therefore, it wouldn't be an example of a pharming attack, it would be domain hijacking and defacement. I think the example should be removed from the section; it's not really a fraud in the same sense as the term is used in the rest of the article. Macwhiz (talk) 13:44, 21 August 2010 (UTC)


 * Done. The Hushmail example was not financial fraud, and there are other examples in that section which are. HairyWombat 02:33, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Email "spoofing" section
In a similar vein to the above comment, the whole section titled Email "spoofing" is not financial fraud. Therefore, I suggest this section be removed. (Instead, a link to the main article, "Spoofing attack", could be added to the See also section.) What do others think? HairyWombat 02:33, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Internet Fraud
Fraudulent appeals for services: The providers are found via internet advertising and are attracted to the scam through offers of advance payment for a block of services. The providers then "mistakenly" receive over-payment in the form of a check in advance of services and are asked to wire the excess money back to the potential customer imediately. The customer claims that he will come for services as soon as the money has been wired, but he never matterializes. If the unsuspecting service-provider has withdrawn the money from his account, after depositing the fraudulent check, there is no way for him to recover the money. The service-provider's account is never credited with the money listed on the check. Typical scams include fraudulent appeals for blocks of psychotherapy or dancing lessons.87.163.80.227 (talk) 09:08, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Scam websites
I came across the "satellite direct" site that sounded too good to be true: 3500 channels on your PC for one single payment and a software download. Indeed, a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pghh-G6ktXE) asserts it is a scam and proves it with screen captures, because the product does not deliver as advertised on the site. At http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=126028 the majority opinion is that it is a scam, or at the very least fraudulent advertising. Further, one can find dozens of clearly paid-for positive reviews all over the place. Some of them even claim to be "honest"...

I am not sure if this article needs a new category of "Scamish websites", or where to put Satellite Direct... josei (talk) 04:25, 16 June 2012 (UTC)