Advantages And Disadvantages Of Fraud

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The use of social media to communicate among different people in the contemporary world has indeed come to stay. This is because social media is a pretty nifty tool for keeping in touch to a large number of heterogeneous audiences within the shortest possible time. Platforms such as Facebook, email, Twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp among others offer us variety of ways in which we can remain connected at all times. However, our seemingly endless capacity for sharing, swiping, liking and retweeting has some negative consequences, not the least of which is that it opens us up as targets for online frauds. Some of the social media disadvantages are the emergence of online fraud by some dubious characters. For instance, they hijacked users’ accounts, …show more content…

(n. d.) edited a compendium of works on “Fraud Typologies and Victims of Fraud”. Their work examines wide range of online frauds which affect individuals and corporate organizations. It highlights the diversity within fraud including who perpetrates it and the level of innovation and skill involved in committing fraud, thus coining the word ‘scampreneurs’ to describe these criminals. The report found that there are wide ranges of techniques used to commit frauds, which can be divided into four areas: first, victim selection techniques; second, perpetration strategies; third, detection avoiding strategies; and fourth, securing the gains. The report also classified online fraud into: Internet matrix scams where the scammers operate via online adverts offering free gifts; Internet dialer scams where fraudsters send out emails or create pop up boxes on websites, which when downloaded or clicked upon downloads software that changes their Internet settings and African advanced fee frauds, here fraudsters use mail, e-mail or faxes to target potential victims with usually a fictitious scenario of a corrupt government official who has ‘procured’ large sum money and who needs a bank account to place it.
Ngo-Ye (2013)’s Stress from Internet Fraud and Online Social Support is another study which investigated ordinary user’s response to internet transaction fraud and examining the types of online social support. The study adapted the stress process model from the psychological literature and applied it to the context of internet fraud. Using qualitative case study (in-depth interviews with the victims belief, emotion and behavior response to a fraud and discussions on eBay Community Answer Centre, the study found two types of support mechanisms – the factual information exchange and emotional

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