Would you click on that?
June 27, 2007 Leave a comment
Inexperienced (young and old) users connect to the web every minute. Once these users set up an email account, or navigate to a non-reputable site on the web, they can fall prey to online scams.
Spammers and phishers (which I’m lumping together as ‘scammers’, for lack of a better term) are getting more clever. I’ve posted about this in various ‘scary phish’ posts, where I deconstruct a piece of scam mail that’s landed in my Inbox. Even with language barriers (which are immediate giveaways to a scam mail), the scammers utilize components (like images) from legitimate sites to improve the quality of the illusion to trap customers of these sites.
The scammers use frightening language, like "your account will be closed" or "it appears your account has been compromised" to lure users into their schemes, and a small percentage (albeit enough to continue to fund these operations) fall prey to their traps.
Baseline posts: "Why We Click", presenting details of some of the psychological tricks scammers are using to trap users on the web.