Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

IF you haven’t received an email offering you a generous proposition of being the beneficiary of an unclaimed bank account with millions of dollars somewhere in Africa, e.g. Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast (you learn lessons in geography), then you are an exception. If you haven’t received an email stating you have won a fortune in a UK lottery, even if you haven’t bought a ticket, then you are an exception.

Behold the dark side of the electronic age in this millennium. The highwayman of old lurked in the dark and preyed on the unwary; the hold-upper used to lie in wait in a grimy street corner and pounced on his prey. These days, to go about his dastardly deed, he sits in a corner of his room, possibly in his pajamas trolling the net, banging away on a keyboard or frequents some smoke-filled internet café hatching schemes, halfway around the world.

The electronic age has brought us wonders and unbelievable convenience defying space/time constraints allowing us to do things we can only do in previous times if we were physically present in one place. With an internet connection, we can do great and wonderful things that were the stuff of science fiction not so long ago. But there is a downside to the electronic age.

The amount of available crud on the net is staggering. The level of sophistication is up. Those of us who log on to the net are all at risk, unless and until we take the necessary psychological precautions to deal with this and become relatively "scam proof." No one is sacrosanct. These scams, like the monumental Ponzi scheme in the $65 billion magnitude perpetrated by Bernie Madoff who incidentally, will rot in jail with little recompense to those he scammed, are designed to prey upon two basic weaknesses in our human nature: GREED and FEAR.

For the little people out of the orbit of the likes of Madoff, who scammed the rich and powerful, however, here’s one blanket caveat to keep us on our toes about how lottery scams and propositions of huge fortunes left in orphaned accounts and how these cons play out in cyberspace. REMEMBER — and this can’t be emphasized often enough, on this matter, and perhaps, other significant areas of life — IF IT’S TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT PROBABLY IS. Okay, repeat that as your mantra. A smidgen of cynicism will serve us all in good stead.

The scams that feed on greed are so sophisticated that scammers can send a seemingly authentic check, complete with watermarks, by mail from a real sounding bank with so many zeroes on it. If you bite at the first overture, they then ask for a processing fee and get all pertinent information from you so you can get the rest of the "winnings." This is called the Nigerian scam apparently because the first perpetrators allegedly were well educated but destitute Nigerians who found that their facility for the English language could be exploited to scam millions using the internet. The scam has spread and morphed with mind-boggling variations, from Russia to China to Japan, but with only one nefarious purpose. To be fair, the scam is no longer just Nigerian but has become international with many copycats. No one race or culture has the monopoly on these. These can originate anywhere in the world. If you have not consciously joined any lottery, why in heaven’s name would you think you have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning even one thin dime? Also, legitimate lotteries will NEVER, repeat NEVER, ask you for money in order for a winner to claim a prize.

Some scams feed on your fear. One of the most deceptive things is to receive an email from your bank instructing you to click on a link and verify your information since someone supposedly is accessing your account and if you don’t verify your information, particularly your pin number or password, this can result in a temporary hold on your funds. Yeah, right.