Published in ET on April 29, 2010 (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5870831.cms)
Rishi V K
Three years ago, Joshua Bell, one of the best classical musicians in the world, walked into a busy Washington metro subway station in jeans, T-shirt and a baseball cap and started playing his violin just like any street musician.
In the next 45 minutes Bell performed some of the best compositions ever written. Free for all.
Yet, there was hardly any listener.
More than a thousand people passed by and just seven stopped to give him an ear. And only one person identified Bell who collected $32.17 for the performance. Just three days earlier he had full-house show at Boston Symphony Hall where a decent seat went for $100.
The metro stunt when some of the best music fell on nobody’s ear was initiated by Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten who used it to join the classic debate on beauty and highlight the frenetic pace of modern life. He got a Pulitzer for his article.
It could have happened anywhere. The response would not have been much different in Delhi or Mumbai. In fact, almost 20 years before Bell’s metro performance, rock star Bruce Springsteen once joined a street musician in Copenhagen to play a song. Not many people noticed him, either.
How come? It’s not that people are not interested in music. Some of those who passed by, completely ignoring Bell, may have been his fans. The US is after all the largest market for music, be it classical, rock, rap or live performance.
Yet, that day the superstar violinist was royally ignored. It’s not just life at the speed of light. People were busy, but they were in a hurry. In the video – it’s there on YouTube and Washington Post website — one can see many people strolling by without even noticing the musician.
In fact, there was a fairly long queue before a lottery machine in the station. People had to wait five to ten minutes for their turn. It might have been the most inactive 10 minutes of their day, yet nobody in the queue had time for a street musician. So what if he lends his soul to his music, they would rather listen to Joshua Bell in their iPod! Or, talk on their phone or chew on their nails.
Everybody was preoccupied. More in thoughts than in action. With the business of their lives; with hundreds of small and big tensions that make up their lives. From meeting an official deadline to picking up child from day care to booking a holiday to whatever, everybody is engrossed in their private tensions, their private lives, their private worlds.
Joshua Bell was alone in public world. And his music — loud and clear and beautiful — was there for everybody, to share and enjoy. Yet, very few got it.
The problem is with the system. It forces people to be on their own, to fend for themselves. It encourages selfishness and calls it competitiveness. It forces people to scramble for their lives and calls it fair play. The challenge is to amass maximum wealth.
Nobody is spared. Everybody is in a Formula One car, racing with everybody else. You are either a winner or a loser. Either way, you are alone, in your private, air-tight world.
It’s inhuman, yet this lifestyle was the most sought-after; at least then.
It was 2007, before the financial crisis rocked the world. Every country wanted to be the United States. Every people aspired for the American way of life — a lifestyle then president George Bush would not yet compromise.
And those people who walked through some of the best music with their ears shut are supposed to be among the luckiest, living the rest-of-the-world’s dream.
What is it that makes capitalism at the same time inhuman and romanticised? Why it is not challenged? Where are the world’s social philosophers? Are they talking alternatives? Why are their voices subdued?
Capitalism may or may not be the best system. But it is effective. And it’s selfish, like its successful practitioners.
Any person or idea that challenges it is labelled ‘communist’ or ‘loser’ or ‘unrealistic’ or whatever. These labels are assigned a negative connotation — a no-no zone for the smart and the hep.
Things could be changing though, however slightly. After the global crisis that felled once-deemed-invisible institutions such as Lehman Brothers and General Motors and forced a change in the American gas-guzzler way of life, there are more talks and action on sustainable growth, clean technology and regulated markets. They point to a less selfish, more human system.
There is no evidence that these changes and the saner voice of President Barack Obama have made Americans slow down a bit and keep their eyes and ears more open to the world around.
Perhaps it’s time Joshua Bell repeated his metro performance.
ends
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Work for Microsoft, fly to South Africa…online frauds show the moon to steal pennies
An edited version of this was published in The Economic Times on May 22 (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Protect-yourself-from-fake-online-job-offers-and-lotteries/articleshow/5960181.cms)
Rajiv Singh & Rishi V K
New Delhi
Dear Sunil C,
Virgin Atlantic is pleased to offer you a job in London. You will get a salary of 6,900 pounds per month plus family accommodation, free education for children, a brand new Toyota Camry, 15 days leave after every 90 working days and free flight tickets. To accept the offer, send a copy of your passport along with a demand draft of 1,000 pounds towards visa processing fee to Virgin.
Sender: Dr Williams Carter Lee, HR department, Virgin Atlantic London Extension. Email: virginatlantic@london.com, virgincareer@london.com
Sunil (name changed), a 38-year-old chartered accountant in Delhi, pinched himself before calling out to his wife Sonia.
A monthly salary of Rs 4.7 lakh! That’s more than four times what his current employer, a private internet firm, pays Sunil. That too, without even a telephonic interview, based on his profile at a placement portal.
It was April, but not the fool’s day.
Sunil checked out the UK airline’s website. He noted that the address, www.virgin-atlantic.com, was different from where the email had come from. Sure enough, the company's career site had a warning against job offer emails.
"It was embarrassing; Sonia had already broken the news to my parents and some friends before I realised it was a scam," says Sunil.
His offer had come from an online money laundering racket. One of many.
Such frauds are on the rise as they find easy preys to bogus job and lottery offers in a world where greed is inseparable from need.
Thousands of racketeers across the world are sending mails and calling up people on various pretexts to extract money and personal details such as credit card numbers and banking passwords and plunder crores of rupees.
Their attacks have intensified recently, fuelled by the growing use of internet and mobile phone as well as the general desperation of a global downturn that left millions jobless, mostly in the West.
In 2009, they are estimated to have duped 11.1 million Americans — almost 5% of its adult population — of $54 billion through bogus offers and identity theft, forcing regulators, banks and other institutions to spruce up the defence through warnings, denials, security alerts and most importantly mass awareness drives.
“The situation is really bad,” says Alpana Killawala, spokeswoman of the Reserve Bank of India.
The central bank will soon launch a television, print and internet campaign in 13 languages to spread awareness among people about such scams, she says. “We are in talks with TV channels for the slots and the campaign will be aired soon.”
It already runs a continuous ticker on its website, www.rbi.org.in, cautioning people of fictitious offers, lottery winnings and cheap fund offers.
Stealing You Softly
In this Age of Information, thieves don’t steal you at gunpoint; they make you happily give away money or key details of your bank account and credit card.
These scamsters are populated across the world, working in groups or on their own, creating websites and email addresses such as adidas@adidas.org that sounds official addresses of established institutions and shooting off job and lottery offers. Or, creating fictitious accounts and sending spam mails saying the recipient is the chosen one to inherit the assets of a millionaire with no family. Or, just calling up people pretending to be a bank executive calling to verify their personal details such as date of birth, address, internet banking password...
Around the same time as Sunil got his not-even-once-in-a-lifetime offer from Virgin Atlantic, Manish P, a software engineer working with a Delhi-based small company, got a much more believable email purportedly from Korean electronics maker Sansui Technologies India.
It was an invitation for the final interview for a Rs 2.5 lakh-plus job. He had to pay Rs 6,050 as surety before the company send him flight tickets and hotel booking details to attend the interview in New Delhi on May 14. (Imagine a Delhi-Delhi flight ticket.) The money was to be deposited in favour of Mr Ajay Kumar Gupta at Shivalik Mercantile Bank A/C no 169810100006001 latest by May 5.
Manish did not do it. Neither did Mike K, another software engineer working in Delhi, who received a similarly worded offer from Intex India. In this case, the surety amount of Rs 5,250 was to be deposited at EDC (Ernakulam District Cooperative) Bank A/C no 2489734535646 by April 7.
They were smart enough to check if the mail was genuine. After all, these companies were only a local call away for these Delhiites.
Suveer Kumar Gupta, CEO of Saharanpur (UP)-based Shivalik Mercantile Bank, denied any money transfer from the bank. “This email (fake job offer mail) is misusing our name and is detrimental to our good image and reputation,” he told ET. “We have already lodged a complaint with The Additional Commissioner of Police, Cyber Crimes Division, New Delhi," he added.
When contacted, C Bhanu, general manager of the Kochi-based bank, expressed shock that his bank is used by online frauds. “We are not at all aware of such incidents. It's shocking,” he said. “We will get the information published in newspapers so that people may become aware of such frauds,” he said.
Mr Gupta too said his bank is trying to spread awareness among customers to prevent any misuse.
Experts say these fraudsters use small banks to run such scams because it's easy for them to evade detection. “Most of the small banks in India don't have sufficient mechanism and technical knowhow to detect frauds of such scale,” says Mahesh Singh, a Delhi-based cyber crime analyst. “So, they become easy target.”
Also, it is easier to open and close accounts in smaller banks, experts say. Fly-by-night accounts. In fact, by the time ET contacted Shivalik Mercantile Bank and EDC Bank, the said accounts did not exist.
These fraudsters appear so genuine. They can issue certificates, letters and circulars on letterheads that look like that of the Reserve Bank of India or any other organisation, duly signed by senior officials, to make such offers look genuine. They provide telephone numbers and e-mail IDs that look genuine.
While multinational rackets mostly take bigger bets with big-dollar job offers and migration, smaller players are content with TV coupons and gift processing or shipping fee.
With the use of mobile phones spreading much faster than the use of the Internet, many fraudsters now reach their victims through the phone.
Easy Preys
An ET journalist recently got a missed call from a Pakistan number. When he returned the call, one Arjun Singh told him that he had won Rs 15 lakh lottery from Airtel, his mobile operator. Singh claimed he was at Airtel office in Mumbai, but hung up when asked why his Mumbai number carries Pakistan country code.
And there are those who call up behalf of banks and other service providers to “verify” your credit card, account and contact details. Only to steal your identity and money.
In the last two years, India lost more than Rs 115 crore to online banking frauds and the number of cases more than doubled last year, minister of state for finance Namo Narain Meena told the Rajya Sabha last week.
Many Indians are also falling for international lottery scams. The Reserve Bank of India has clarified several times that the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999, prohibits sending money abroad for securing price money and awards or to participate in lottery and money circulation schemes. Yet, many people break the law, only to be cheated.
“When it comes to interacting safely online, the awareness level of Indian Web users is dramatically low,” says Rajiv Chadha, vice president of internet security service provider VeriSign.
Nine out of every 10 internet users in the country have experienced cyber threats, he says quoting a recent study commissioned by VeriSign. Yet, 83% of the people do not check if a website is genuine.
It’s this lack of awareness that helps the new-age goons expose the virtual reality that the cyber police is.
Lawmakers have yet to find ways to police the countless labyrinths of the cyber world.
“At present, the law is a toothless tiger against emerging cyber threats,” says Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate and cyber law expert.
In India, the IT Act does not even cover such scams; they are considered cheating offence under the Indian Penal Code, which is bailable and easy to get away, he says.
More developed countries have stronger cyber laws, but they are unable to check such scams because racketeers can operate virtually from any part of the world.
As many as 11.1 million adults in the US lost $54 billion through identity theft last year, according to a recent study by Javelin Strategy & Research, an independent provider of research focused exclusively on financial services.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, recently said cybercrime is the third-highest priority for the intelligence agency after terrorism and counterintelligence.
The US Federal Trade Commission recently launched ‘Opeartion Bottom Dollar’ and the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce last month ran a weeklong campaign, Online Offensive — Fighting Fraud Online.
Private companies such as mobile firms, banks and security service providers too are trying to alert their users against such scams through advertisements, messages and webpage postings.
While most companies have posted warning messages on their websites, very few are taking any initiative to combat the fraudsters and take them to the law. They leave it to the victims.
"If a member of the public has fallen victim to these sort of issues (bogus offers on behalf of the company) then we would advise them to report the matter to their local law enforcement authority," says Katie Francis, interim press officer at Virgin Atlantic Airways.
Cyber security experts say there is no way companies can go after scamsters because there is no end to it. Anybody can potentially run such a racket from any corner of the world.
So, it requires international cooperation to take them on. But, so far, there is no major international initiative to counter online fraud except for a European Commission (EC) plan to form an EU agency to tackle cybercrime.
Wake Up Call
While the stout bureaucrats take their own time to build a cyber defence, the agile scamsters have backed their superior technical knowhow with sharp marketing skills to create a deadly mix. They don’t miss out on big events.
Right now, they are feasting on the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup football championship with offers of prizes, free tickets and stay for the biggest event of the world’s most popular game.
With the kickoff less than a month away, thousands of e-mails and phone messages are crowding inboxes, informing recipients that they have won substantial sums as lottery awarded by world soccer governing body FIFA and South Africa’s World Cup Local Organising Committee (LOC), or brands associated with the tournament such as German sports goods maker Adidas.
FIFA has issued several media releases, starting from back in 2005, disowning such mails and messages. Adidas website carries a warning that it has nothing to do with adidas.org. "The Adidas Group would like to warn consumers that emails from adidas@adidas.org claiming that the recipient has won US$800,000 are fake," it reads.
They lure their victims with various offers, from jobs to free tickets for FIFA World Cup Football, and urge them to send visa charges or processing fees that could be anything from TV recharge coupons to tens of dollars in foreign exchange.
While multinational rackets mostly take bigger bets with big-dollar job offers and migration, smaller players are content with TV coupons and gift processing or shipping fee.
It is easy to fall for their tricks. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, some months back admitted that he was one click away from sending his bank account information to phishers.
The only way to check them is to be alert. At an individual level.
“Remember, there are no free lunches. Do not believe in any unbelievable offer,” says Mr Duggal. "Any law comes into play only after the crime has been committed. So, the best thing to do is to exercise due diligence and caution."
Banks, mobile operators, job portals and other institutions such as ICICI Bank, Airtel and TimesJobs.com alert people against such scams through messages, media campaigns and sometimes through timely interventions.
The ET journalist earlier mentioned got a message from the phone operator warning against calling unknown number and sharing personal details, within hours of calling up the Pakistan number.
Yet, while almost every company is screaming caution, nobody seems to be listening.
According to VeriSign’s Rajiv Chadha, more than 60% of the internet users in India access the Web at least 4-6 times a week and many of them are using it for shopping and banking. But only 9% of the users are aware of visual cues such as the green address bar that signifies it is a secure site, according to the VeriSign survey conducted by IMRB among 5,000 Internet users across 10 cities in 2009.
It’s time to wake up.
"As long as you are alert, you can't be duped. It's only when you drop your caution and give in to the 'incredible' offer of the fraudster that the problem starts," says Vivek Madhukar, VP, TimesJobs.com, a job search site of the Times of India group.
ends
Rajiv Singh & Rishi V K
New Delhi
Dear Sunil C,
Virgin Atlantic is pleased to offer you a job in London. You will get a salary of 6,900 pounds per month plus family accommodation, free education for children, a brand new Toyota Camry, 15 days leave after every 90 working days and free flight tickets. To accept the offer, send a copy of your passport along with a demand draft of 1,000 pounds towards visa processing fee to Virgin.
Sender: Dr Williams Carter Lee, HR department, Virgin Atlantic London Extension. Email: virginatlantic@london.com, virgincareer@london.com
Sunil (name changed), a 38-year-old chartered accountant in Delhi, pinched himself before calling out to his wife Sonia.
A monthly salary of Rs 4.7 lakh! That’s more than four times what his current employer, a private internet firm, pays Sunil. That too, without even a telephonic interview, based on his profile at a placement portal.
It was April, but not the fool’s day.
Sunil checked out the UK airline’s website. He noted that the address, www.virgin-atlantic.com, was different from where the email had come from. Sure enough, the company's career site had a warning against job offer emails.
"It was embarrassing; Sonia had already broken the news to my parents and some friends before I realised it was a scam," says Sunil.
His offer had come from an online money laundering racket. One of many.
Such frauds are on the rise as they find easy preys to bogus job and lottery offers in a world where greed is inseparable from need.
Thousands of racketeers across the world are sending mails and calling up people on various pretexts to extract money and personal details such as credit card numbers and banking passwords and plunder crores of rupees.
Their attacks have intensified recently, fuelled by the growing use of internet and mobile phone as well as the general desperation of a global downturn that left millions jobless, mostly in the West.
In 2009, they are estimated to have duped 11.1 million Americans — almost 5% of its adult population — of $54 billion through bogus offers and identity theft, forcing regulators, banks and other institutions to spruce up the defence through warnings, denials, security alerts and most importantly mass awareness drives.
“The situation is really bad,” says Alpana Killawala, spokeswoman of the Reserve Bank of India.
The central bank will soon launch a television, print and internet campaign in 13 languages to spread awareness among people about such scams, she says. “We are in talks with TV channels for the slots and the campaign will be aired soon.”
It already runs a continuous ticker on its website, www.rbi.org.in, cautioning people of fictitious offers, lottery winnings and cheap fund offers.
Stealing You Softly
In this Age of Information, thieves don’t steal you at gunpoint; they make you happily give away money or key details of your bank account and credit card.
These scamsters are populated across the world, working in groups or on their own, creating websites and email addresses such as adidas@adidas.org that sounds official addresses of established institutions and shooting off job and lottery offers. Or, creating fictitious accounts and sending spam mails saying the recipient is the chosen one to inherit the assets of a millionaire with no family. Or, just calling up people pretending to be a bank executive calling to verify their personal details such as date of birth, address, internet banking password...
Around the same time as Sunil got his not-even-once-in-a-lifetime offer from Virgin Atlantic, Manish P, a software engineer working with a Delhi-based small company, got a much more believable email purportedly from Korean electronics maker Sansui Technologies India.
It was an invitation for the final interview for a Rs 2.5 lakh-plus job. He had to pay Rs 6,050 as surety before the company send him flight tickets and hotel booking details to attend the interview in New Delhi on May 14. (Imagine a Delhi-Delhi flight ticket.) The money was to be deposited in favour of Mr Ajay Kumar Gupta at Shivalik Mercantile Bank A/C no 169810100006001 latest by May 5.
Manish did not do it. Neither did Mike K, another software engineer working in Delhi, who received a similarly worded offer from Intex India. In this case, the surety amount of Rs 5,250 was to be deposited at EDC (Ernakulam District Cooperative) Bank A/C no 2489734535646 by April 7.
They were smart enough to check if the mail was genuine. After all, these companies were only a local call away for these Delhiites.
Suveer Kumar Gupta, CEO of Saharanpur (UP)-based Shivalik Mercantile Bank, denied any money transfer from the bank. “This email (fake job offer mail) is misusing our name and is detrimental to our good image and reputation,” he told ET. “We have already lodged a complaint with The Additional Commissioner of Police, Cyber Crimes Division, New Delhi," he added.
When contacted, C Bhanu, general manager of the Kochi-based bank, expressed shock that his bank is used by online frauds. “We are not at all aware of such incidents. It's shocking,” he said. “We will get the information published in newspapers so that people may become aware of such frauds,” he said.
Mr Gupta too said his bank is trying to spread awareness among customers to prevent any misuse.
Experts say these fraudsters use small banks to run such scams because it's easy for them to evade detection. “Most of the small banks in India don't have sufficient mechanism and technical knowhow to detect frauds of such scale,” says Mahesh Singh, a Delhi-based cyber crime analyst. “So, they become easy target.”
Also, it is easier to open and close accounts in smaller banks, experts say. Fly-by-night accounts. In fact, by the time ET contacted Shivalik Mercantile Bank and EDC Bank, the said accounts did not exist.
These fraudsters appear so genuine. They can issue certificates, letters and circulars on letterheads that look like that of the Reserve Bank of India or any other organisation, duly signed by senior officials, to make such offers look genuine. They provide telephone numbers and e-mail IDs that look genuine.
While multinational rackets mostly take bigger bets with big-dollar job offers and migration, smaller players are content with TV coupons and gift processing or shipping fee.
With the use of mobile phones spreading much faster than the use of the Internet, many fraudsters now reach their victims through the phone.
Easy Preys
An ET journalist recently got a missed call from a Pakistan number. When he returned the call, one Arjun Singh told him that he had won Rs 15 lakh lottery from Airtel, his mobile operator. Singh claimed he was at Airtel office in Mumbai, but hung up when asked why his Mumbai number carries Pakistan country code.
And there are those who call up behalf of banks and other service providers to “verify” your credit card, account and contact details. Only to steal your identity and money.
In the last two years, India lost more than Rs 115 crore to online banking frauds and the number of cases more than doubled last year, minister of state for finance Namo Narain Meena told the Rajya Sabha last week.
Many Indians are also falling for international lottery scams. The Reserve Bank of India has clarified several times that the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999, prohibits sending money abroad for securing price money and awards or to participate in lottery and money circulation schemes. Yet, many people break the law, only to be cheated.
“When it comes to interacting safely online, the awareness level of Indian Web users is dramatically low,” says Rajiv Chadha, vice president of internet security service provider VeriSign.
Nine out of every 10 internet users in the country have experienced cyber threats, he says quoting a recent study commissioned by VeriSign. Yet, 83% of the people do not check if a website is genuine.
It’s this lack of awareness that helps the new-age goons expose the virtual reality that the cyber police is.
Lawmakers have yet to find ways to police the countless labyrinths of the cyber world.
“At present, the law is a toothless tiger against emerging cyber threats,” says Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate and cyber law expert.
In India, the IT Act does not even cover such scams; they are considered cheating offence under the Indian Penal Code, which is bailable and easy to get away, he says.
More developed countries have stronger cyber laws, but they are unable to check such scams because racketeers can operate virtually from any part of the world.
As many as 11.1 million adults in the US lost $54 billion through identity theft last year, according to a recent study by Javelin Strategy & Research, an independent provider of research focused exclusively on financial services.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, recently said cybercrime is the third-highest priority for the intelligence agency after terrorism and counterintelligence.
The US Federal Trade Commission recently launched ‘Opeartion Bottom Dollar’ and the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce last month ran a weeklong campaign, Online Offensive — Fighting Fraud Online.
Private companies such as mobile firms, banks and security service providers too are trying to alert their users against such scams through advertisements, messages and webpage postings.
While most companies have posted warning messages on their websites, very few are taking any initiative to combat the fraudsters and take them to the law. They leave it to the victims.
"If a member of the public has fallen victim to these sort of issues (bogus offers on behalf of the company) then we would advise them to report the matter to their local law enforcement authority," says Katie Francis, interim press officer at Virgin Atlantic Airways.
Cyber security experts say there is no way companies can go after scamsters because there is no end to it. Anybody can potentially run such a racket from any corner of the world.
So, it requires international cooperation to take them on. But, so far, there is no major international initiative to counter online fraud except for a European Commission (EC) plan to form an EU agency to tackle cybercrime.
Wake Up Call
While the stout bureaucrats take their own time to build a cyber defence, the agile scamsters have backed their superior technical knowhow with sharp marketing skills to create a deadly mix. They don’t miss out on big events.
Right now, they are feasting on the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup football championship with offers of prizes, free tickets and stay for the biggest event of the world’s most popular game.
With the kickoff less than a month away, thousands of e-mails and phone messages are crowding inboxes, informing recipients that they have won substantial sums as lottery awarded by world soccer governing body FIFA and South Africa’s World Cup Local Organising Committee (LOC), or brands associated with the tournament such as German sports goods maker Adidas.
FIFA has issued several media releases, starting from back in 2005, disowning such mails and messages. Adidas website carries a warning that it has nothing to do with adidas.org. "The Adidas Group would like to warn consumers that emails from adidas@adidas.org claiming that the recipient has won US$800,000 are fake," it reads.
They lure their victims with various offers, from jobs to free tickets for FIFA World Cup Football, and urge them to send visa charges or processing fees that could be anything from TV recharge coupons to tens of dollars in foreign exchange.
While multinational rackets mostly take bigger bets with big-dollar job offers and migration, smaller players are content with TV coupons and gift processing or shipping fee.
It is easy to fall for their tricks. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, some months back admitted that he was one click away from sending his bank account information to phishers.
The only way to check them is to be alert. At an individual level.
“Remember, there are no free lunches. Do not believe in any unbelievable offer,” says Mr Duggal. "Any law comes into play only after the crime has been committed. So, the best thing to do is to exercise due diligence and caution."
Banks, mobile operators, job portals and other institutions such as ICICI Bank, Airtel and TimesJobs.com alert people against such scams through messages, media campaigns and sometimes through timely interventions.
The ET journalist earlier mentioned got a message from the phone operator warning against calling unknown number and sharing personal details, within hours of calling up the Pakistan number.
Yet, while almost every company is screaming caution, nobody seems to be listening.
According to VeriSign’s Rajiv Chadha, more than 60% of the internet users in India access the Web at least 4-6 times a week and many of them are using it for shopping and banking. But only 9% of the users are aware of visual cues such as the green address bar that signifies it is a secure site, according to the VeriSign survey conducted by IMRB among 5,000 Internet users across 10 cities in 2009.
It’s time to wake up.
"As long as you are alert, you can't be duped. It's only when you drop your caution and give in to the 'incredible' offer of the fraudster that the problem starts," says Vivek Madhukar, VP, TimesJobs.com, a job search site of the Times of India group.
ends
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