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Next Monday sees the Office of Fair Trading launch its annual Scamnesty campaign designed to raise awareness of online and offline fraud among consumers and businesses throughout the month of February.
According to the OFT, nearly half of the UK adult population has been targeted by a scam, and more than three million adults - one in 15 people - fall victim to scams, losing a total of £3.5 billion every year. Now not all of this is online-based, but you can bet that a fairly large percentage of it is.
Global IT consultancy Unisys has also taken the opportunity to get involved. It got busy pulling out some of the key findings of its latest biannual Unisys Security Index to compile a top five scams to avoid list.
According to the Index, over 80 per cent of people in the UK are nervous about the misuse of their bank card details and 83 per cent worry about unauthorised access to their personal information - worrying stats for those e-retailers keen to maximise sales and banks looking to cut costs by encouraging use of online banking.
Thus, there are well-versed warnings about using ATM Skimmers and insecure e-commerce sites, placing too much personal information on social networking sites and using unsecured WiFi routers.
All very straightforward advice which if everyone took on board the internet would be a safer place and there would probably be no need for awareness raising campaigns with terrible names like Scamnesty. But then again, that's not very likely, is it?
25 Jan 2010
