Internet Scams

Scams have always been a feature of society. The modern age has made things so much easier for criminals to prey on unsuspecting individuals. Internet scams are widespread and are getting more advanced every day. Just the other day I got an email that surprisingly didn’t go into my spam folder. I say surprising because, this was in my Gmail (Google Mail) inbox and the scam was using Google Drive as it’s lure. The design of the email and the website were so good, it could have even fooled me. Apart from the obvious html link, there was nothing for a normal user to tell the difference from an official Google site.

Not Helping

The reason I’m writing this post though is because of a peculiar experience I had just the other day. My wife called me to say she got an SMS that her phone number was chosen as a part of a competition and she was eligible to win a large sum of money. All she had to do was, send an SMS to a special carrier number and the charge would be OMR 0.400 (approx. $1) per SMS. I immediately thought SCAM! So I told her not to bother and just ignore it. But wait, in Oman you can’t avail a special carrier number and there seemed to be no motive. The alleged con was gaining nothing from this.

After some digging around, I found out that the competition was indeed officially being run by local telecom service provider Omantel. They even offered to have your phone number entered into a chance to win by visiting a special website created (www.omantelchallenge.com). Now, instead of making me feel better about the whole thing, the special website for this “MEGA CASH” promotion is what made me write this rant of a blog post.

As an internet service provider, one of the many tasks is making your users aware of the very real risks of phishing or internet scams. You try to educate people on how to avoid internet scams, what to look for etc. The most common way criminals get away with scamming people is by attempting to replicate a legitimate website, just like the Googledrive scam I mentioned previously. Yet, from first look at the website made for this apparently official competition, you’d have thought it was surely a scam. It begins with a very poor attempt at replicating the original Omantel website, and a VERY bad use of the corporate logo. A domain registered at GoDaddy by an individual in Lebanon with no company details registered to ICANN.

Something’s Not Right

• How does a large corporate even allow it’s logo to be so poorly represented through an official source?
• Why would an Internet service provider, not host this on their own website?
• If they had reasons against that, why not host it through a legitimate source inside Oman?

The Real Problem

Not only does this raise some intriguing questions, it actually irritates me. Because, it should be the responsibility of an Internet service provider to avoid people in the country getting caught out by phishing or internet scams. Instead here, they’ve allowed themselves to be replicated in such a poor way that it would have the opposite effect of what they should be trying to do. Now people aren’t going to think twice before wondering why a website doesn’t look right, because the last time they saw one, it was completely legitimate.

A corporate that represents a nation must do more to better serve it’s customers. There needs to be more responsibility on all fronts and real awareness created about the growing threat of internet scams.

Don’t Get Conned

If you feel like you’ve spotted real phishing, internet scams that use these sort of tactics, do write in or comment below, I’d like to hear your stories. On the other hand, if you feel like you’re being scammed but are not too sure, I’d like to hear from you as well, perhaps I can help.