According to the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, fraud – in all its forms – ranks next to nothing in the hierarchy of crimes committed yearly in the country, leading to the loss of at least 190 billion pounds annually. If you think this figure is mind-boggling, consider another by America’s Federal Trade Commission which posits that one out of every ten adults in the country will fall prey to one type of fraud or the other. As it is, every nation has its share of this heinous crime, and the effects on people’s mental health are better imagined than experienced.
Although fraud can take place in any form and place, the majority of the serious ones take place online. Fraudsters take undue advantage of information technology and the internet to dupe the victims of their savings. Some sophisticated scammers even go as far as intruding into the privacy of their victims by stealing their banks and credit card details.
Why Fraud Keeps Flourishing
In most successful fraudulent escapades, both the fraudster and the victim contribute to making it happen. For many victims, they contribute through deliberate ignorance of the appropriate security measures and how things work out ordinarily. Some victims, however, assist fraudsters with their inordinate ambition to acquire material wealth. For instance, it is not uncommon to find greedy people fall to many get-rich-quick scams.
On the part of the online fraudsters, the porosity of some website’s security architecture often helps them to intrude into people’s details. Again, most fraudsters have found several ways of going undetected and unpunished. And when a crime is under-punished, it tends to survive the more. However, the greatest contribution to the success of online scams is the internet itself. Since it is virtual, someone can build a website for products they don’t sell and even come up with fake reviews to validate them.
Online Scams and Mental Health
It takes someone who has gone through the horrible experience of being scammed to fully comprehend how devastating it can be. There is a momentary feeling of mental confusion and inexplainable pain arising from so many factors in many of the victims. First, you would want to look at how your hard-earned money has gone down the drain. You may not even be able to recover it again.
Another thing victims of online battle with are the feeling of gullibility. This feeling often leads to self-attack and self-blame. Unless there is an immediate help to assist the victim, he/she may take drastic steps such as suicide. Some people have become psychologically unstable due to online fraud.
How Not to Fall Victim to Online Scams
Both educated and non-educated folks fall victim to fraud; this crime knows no age category or race. However, there is something everyone can do to help minimise online scams, and one of these is reading reviews. If any business claim sounds too good to be true, the chances are that they are not. Read reviews about companies and businesses from trusted websites like BritainReviews, a British review site committed to allowing customers to share their experiences about companies in the country. By learning from other people’s experiences, you can avoid falling into scammers’ traps.