By Zaid Shuhaibar
Recently, I read a Fox News article entitled “Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-mail Scam”. According to the article, a woman from Oregon, Janella Spears, fell for an e-mail scam that promised her $20.5 million if she financially helped out a relative named J.B. Spears. Janella Spears was convinced that she was truly helping a relative and at the same time believed she would be awarded millions for doing so. Although family members convinced her that it was a scam, she still mortgaged her house, took a lien out on her family car, and took money out of her retirement account. What made this scam convincing was that the scammers sent her official-looking documents from the Bank of Nigeria and from the United Nations claiming that her payments were guaranteed.
This relates to some of our class discussions this year in showing the dangers of Web 2.0. People need to be more aware of E-mail scams and such hackers on the Internet. Also, this issue relates to people loss of privacy. Janella Spears lost $400,000 to scammers by making payments and releasing some of her information such as her address and possibly credit card numbers. Obviously, this could happen to anyone that is unaware of the scams that occur through e-mail. This article raises many questions about how much people care about their privacy and to what extent people would go to protect their privacy. Are people as aware of the dangers of the Internet as they should be or should that the dangers be promoted more by the government through advertisement? Also, should e-mail be prohibited to people younger than a certain age to avoid scams happening to kids that may not know any better? Finally, are there any ways we could monitor and protect the Internet completely from scammers?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,453125,00.html
1 Comment
November 20, 2008 at 12:12 am
It’s had to hear about these types of cases. However, on a more pessimistic note, this woman was no naive and stubborn that maybe she needed some sort of a wake-up call. The fact that those closes to her (her actual family members) told her that she shouldn’t believe in this scam emphasizes how stubborn she was. This is a lesson to all of us and as Zaid says, plays into the idea of privacy on the web. As part of web 2.0, we have to be pro-active and take action against these types of scammers. However, like it was pointed out in our class discussion on privacy on the web, people won’t act until something like this personally happens to them. Sadly, isolated events like this won’t trigger alarms in people’s brains, it would take a large-scale personal even before people will change from their naivety and stubborness.