It was a busy day and you are happy at the way you have conducted your business. Being one the current generation successful internet entrepreneurs you are one of the bunch that are minting money doing online business. The task is not so tough and the money good.
All you do throughout the day is accepting a job from someone and taking payment and then outsourcing the same to someone else after deducting your commission. There are many others like you who are striking gold on the net in this way. Before calling it a day, you decide to check up your bank balance. You have earned enough money to invest in a small 2-bedroom flat and that will serve as a good investment for the future.
After all, thanks to the collapse of the banking system and loans hard to come by, the prices of real estate have crashed down. Tomorrow you will go to seal the deal of the new flat. A sequence of events leaves your mouth wide open in horror. There is virtually no balance in your bank. You just cannot believe your eyes. You log off and log in again to find that there is just a couple of hundreds of dollars left in your bank. As you check the details you find that you have withdrawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past two days. But this is impossible since you did not log in to the bank for nearly five days. As you collapse into a heap on the chair, you just realize that you have been had.
This is a case of identity theft and someone else had stolen your credit card details and has used the same to withdraw nearly all the money in the bank. He seems to be a smart operator and has not withdrawn all the money in one go. Systematically, over the past few days, he has milked your bank of nearly all your money. Welcome to the world of phishing and identity theft.
You have bet yourself to blame. Just a few days back you had received a letter from your bankers, at least that is what you had thought it to be. According to the email, the bank’s servers had crashed and all clients were requested to change their password. The bank had been kind enough to provide a link to their online banking portal.
Being a dutiful citizen you had clicked on the link and were led to what was your bank’s portal. At least that is how it looked to you. You had not noticed that the site started with a http:// and not a https:/ (`s’ is for `secure’). This was not the bank’s website but of some fraud. When you typed in your user Id original password before typing the one to be substituted, the crook had dutifully noted the same. It was a matter of tie before he helped himself to all your hard earned money.
