Fraud over online Haiti Rescue

24 hours after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, scammers were churning out spam emails to take advantage of the relief efforts. Whenever a global disaster happens, scam artists respond almost as quickly as international relief workers. When tsunami hit the Samoan islands on 29 Sept 2009, scammers and hackers popped up immediately on the web to exploit people who wanted to offer financial assistance. Such is the case with the Haiti quake.

Just hours after Haiti was hit by the massive earthquake, con artists were booking domain names related to the quake in order to set up authentic- looking sites. Oftentimes these sites claim to be associated with charity organizations and ask the users to give their credit card number and other important personal information.

Security experts are also noticing that the scammers are using search engine techniques to rank higher for searches related to the Haiti quake. People when clicked on such sites are presented with a fake warning about viruses in an effort to trick them into downloading malware so that their computer is infected.

To protect oneself from such scams it is advisable to use the most recent available version of your web browser, up-to-date anti-virus software and make sure that all security patches and updates are installed for the web browser and other web-based programs.

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