Peter Bissmire

18-09-20

Fraudulent Scams

We continue to hear of increasing numbers of cases of people being defrauded of large sums of money by scammers.

The whole point of scams is that they are based on a fake — a lie. On-line scams usually involve an e-mail promising the earth where there is no earth to be had or a fake Web-site or both. There is much good advice out there about e-mails but relatively little useful about Web browsing.

When it comes to fake Web-sites, it is an unfortunate fact that the search engine providers finance their operations, in part, by accepting money from site owners for their sites to be be pushed to the top of the results page. They do (minimally) identify these as ad(vertisement)s but most users will not take the trouble to scroll down to the non-advertisement results. Fraudsters, criminal and not so criminal, will make use of this and their sites will benefit from this advantage until they are found out. Some of them will always be ahead in the game. A typical example is a site that charges money to apply for an EHIC card on your behalf while doing it on the official site is free of charge.

Criminals and those on the margins of criminality often set up fake Web-sites that mimic official and other legitimate Web-sites, not stopping at breaches of copyright and commercial protection rights in order to do so (e.g. using logos they do not own).

The problem is compounded by the fact that it has become customary to say, for example, "for more information, visit foo.bar". If you enter "foo.bar" in a "modern" browser, it will redirect you and your entry to your preferred search engine. There is a small but finite risk that this will offer you something convincingly like what you want but not actually located at http(s)://www.foo.bar. You can be sure that the fraudsters are continually working hard on making this happen despite the preventive measures on which others are working equally hard.

It is understandable that, by default, Google Chrome refers you to the Google search engine unless you either do the extra typing required to force the issue or click on a fully explicit link. Google wishes to promote hits on its search engine in order to convince its paying customers that they are getting good value. Similarly, Edge tries to promote Bing. That Opera behaves in the same way is not so easy to understand. Making things easy for a user who seems to know what he is doing seems to have given way to an assumption that all users need assistance at all times.

This is not an advertisement.
It is just a plain fact that, as things presently stand, only the Mozilla browsers (Firefox, SeaMonkey) will take you straight to http(s)://www.foo.bar if you enter "foo.bar" (see ). Until further notice, stay safe, install Firefox.