CyberCops.com - Fighting Internet Fraud

Use our cyber crime prevention site to get free advice about how to deal with scammers, spammers, hackers, and fraudsters. Initially, we offered a free service where you could submit your problem or question and your case was personally handled by one of our fraud experts, but that is something we no longer offer. The reason for this change was that it was almost always a situation where the person could have done a little research and figured out the solution to their problem themselves. So, instead we are now focused on offering all the information people need to deal with online fraud directly on our website, so it can be accessed and acted upon instantly.

The fraud cases we handled usually fell into one of the following 5 categories:

1. Money Making Offers and Money Requests - If somebody is emailing you with an offer or request for money that you think sounds suspicious, it probably is. Typical scam situations includes a foreign woman needing emergency money for a Visa to come to the USA, a soldier needing money to buy a laptop computer, or a man having a pending business deal/job/payment but just needs some cash temporarily. The best thing to do is look it up in Google. Do a search in Google for their name and and the word scam, like "Marina Savinova scam" or if that does not show any results try adding some additional identifying information such as "Marina Savinova Russia scam" or "Marina Savinova romance scam". First try your search in Google without quotes, but if you don't get any results then try quotes at the beginning and end. The quotes make Google search for those exact words in that exact order, which makes it a much more narrow search more likely to show the results you are looking for. Sometimes if their name does not show any scams in Google, try copying a few sentences from their email, and copy that into the Google search box. This might show you a bunch of other scammers using the same exact email, but with a different name.

2. Partial Payments - If somebody mails you a money order and tells you to keep some of it and then send/wire them the rest, it is a scam. The money order they send you will be fake, and although you can deposit it in your bank and see a credit in your account, a few days later your bank will take the money out because they will see the money order is fraudulent.

3. Buyer Beware - If you were ripped off by a website or person, like you ordered something and it never arrived and they do not respond to your calls and emails, here's what to do:
A) Call your credit card company (or however you paid) asap and dispute the charge.
B) If you live in the USA, report it at the FBI cyber crime website at http://www.ic3.gov
C) If the company is in the USA, or Canada, report it to the Better Business Bureau at BBB.org
D) Report it on complaint sites like RipoffReport.com.
E) If it is a website, you might also want to lookup who owns the domain. You can do that at BetterWhois.com.
F) Contact your local police or the police in the city where that person/company lives.

4. Spam - If you are getting email spam, you can:
A) Block it using the spam filter in your email program. You can probably blacklist certain email addresses or subject lines.
B) Lookup who owns the domain that is sending the email, and much more importantly the domain of the website being promoted in the email. You can do that at BetterWhois.com. You can try complaining to whoever is listed as the contact for the domain, and also you can complain to whoever hosts the website. The web host is many times listed in the "Name Server" part of the whois information. Most web hosts will shut down a website if they know it is sending out spam.
C) If you live in the USA, you can report the spam at ic3.gov

5. Online Abuse - If somebody is harassing you (cyber bullying, blackmail/extortion, hacking, etc.):
A) Report the abuse to whatever site you are using. For example, on Facebook go to Facebook Abuse Support. If you account has been hacked, look up the solution in Google. For Gmail for example, do a Google search for "hacked Gmail account" and it will lead you to Gmail Account Support.
B) Contact your local police, or even your local FBI office
C) Depending on the situation, you may want to contact a local private investigator who specializes computer crimes. You can search in Google for this.

There are of course hundreds of other types of Internet fraud that you should be aware of, so please read through the articles below to find out more:



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