I know the warning signs of a non credible website. I’ve watched the news specials, read the articles about identity theft and internet scams, even pitied the women on Dr. Phil who were scammed out of thousands of dollars by their Nigerian love interest, Hansel.
After hearing these stories, I swore I would never offer my identity on a silver platter to the internet for easy access. I vowed to take a cynical approach to websites, keeping wary of the intentions of identity related inquiries and steering clear of suspicious typos and cyber space dead ends; the free credit report .com guy taught me that much.
I figured the scams would be easy enough to detect, yet even in my cautious state of mind I was duped when I visited www.fafsa.com and encountered a user-friendly website promising a quick and necessary porthole to college monetary bliss, or so it seemed. Personal information in hand, I began to offer my life story in numbers to the application -- license number, date of birth, and of course, the king of all identification, my social security number.
I sped through the form without thinking twice, and felt fairly efficient until I came to the last section of the form where I was asked to pay eighty dollars to confirm my application. FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, key word being “free.”
Confused, I returned to the home page to find small print claiming no affiliation with the Board of Education. I had just given every piece of my personal information to the wrong site. To my knowledge, this site guarantees full security of my information and is a legal site that helps fill out the form for a fee, but it is also one more location my information is on file that I have to worry about.
I no longer believe my identity theft radar to be invincible and stand corrected; not all scams are easy to spot. I’m sure that website has taken money from college students that do not realize their mistake, even if they do claim to be “credible.“
There are thousands of other disguised sites that are designed to trick and confuse web surfers into disclosing information. In the past few weeks the problem has only gotten worse due to many sites claiming to be a helping liaison to the people of Haiti. Pathetic and desperate, scammers are taking advantage and playing off emotion in this time of need.
Social networks are infected with people posing as victims, and e-mails claiming to contain pictures of the devastation quickly spread computer viruses. Donators are told to be skeptical and careful of such propaganda, but the fact that they even have to only makes me skeptical of our country’s morals.
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