_ClickDontBeFrauded.aspx flat or house rental self contained property and accommodation to rent.

Protecting yourself against on-line fraud.

If you are going to pay someone some money for a property then you need to see the property and the person before you pay.

If you adhere to this rule, then the internet can't defraud you.

There are thieves out there, but they can't 'mug' you: they can only steal from you over the internet if you walk into a bank and SEND them money.

It's routine to label people that succumb to this sort of thing as 'stupid.' The evidence doesn't really bear this out: there's no particular type of individual that gets duped, just someone who is desperate/tired/off guard/needsSomeOneToHelpRightNow.

It's PC to pretend that the large majority of these scams don't come from Nigeria. This is rubbish. They nearly all originate in Nigeria. A smaller number originate from the US (next biggest) and the rest from Russia and the Far East. In general the situation reflects the willingness of Governments in those countries to police 'their patch' and the US is surprisingly lax, but this has historically been the case, even when the internet was in it's infancy.

In case you don't know what a scam might look like, this is one (from Nigeria in case you need to ask.) in action

Notice the squirming reasons why the money has to come first. Also the fraudster making out that they in fact have been defrauded in the past: a clever distraction from what is actually going on.

Also it's worth mentioning the spelling and grammar: it contains very elementary mistakes, and this is typical of such an attempted scam that comes out of Nigeria.

Some journalists herald this kind of thing as a new kind of 'cyber' crime. Is it hell. It's as old as The Ark: It's well known that many pairs of animals were scammed into believing they they'd been chosen for Noah's Ark whereas in fact it had sailed three weeks before.

More seriously, it used to be classified ads in newspapers that were the vehicle because they allowed the fraudster to be unseen by the victim.

I do a lot (and mean hours and hours and hours ) of time writing software to keep these people in their box and keep ahead of their game. It has become a bit of a mission (and possibly an obsession.)

There was a bad patch last Summer that galvanised me into thinking of ways of harnessing computers into combatting these people, and I've been quite successful.