The rate of advancement in technology is fascinating. Many people are also trying to outsmart the system and defraud others.
Failure of cyber security has caused many people pain. Nigeria as a country has suffered from the discrimination of being a country of fraudulent characters because of the activities of a few. From email compromise to social media love scams, there are many ways that the perpetrators get to their potential victims. These criminals flaunt their wealth online and make other hardworking people appear lazy. We have many people in prison presently who were at a time a motivational figure to other youths. When the truth of their wealth was unraveled, they became candidates for prisons.
I have read many cases of people defrauding others through the internet, and I have been very careful not to fall victim. I haven't experienced falling victim to cyber security failure directly. The closest experience I had is what I would like to talk about.
On a fateful day, I was going through my social media apps, and I stumbled on a message from my boss at work. Hajia Hauwa is a humble woman who knows how to relate with her subordinates perfectly. We hardly chat except during festive seasons, when we do exchange goodwill messages. Getting a notification of a message from her that day made me rush to open the message.
In the message, she wrote a convincing message for me to lend her 75,000 naira. She told me that her bank network was bad and she couldn't make a transfer to someone. She submitted the account details of the so-called third party and asked me to send the money to the person with a promise that he would refund me once his phone network was restored.
The message was strange initially because I least expected Hajia to talk to her subordinate of money in that manner. However, on a second thought, I convinced myself that situations could make one step down some principles a times. The woman is a type of person that I can take a loan for.
I navigated my way to my banking application. Just before inputting the account details shared with me, it occurred to me that I should call her before sending the money.
After she picked up my call, I went straight to acknowledging the message and told her that I was about to send the money. The woman screamed. She asked me if I hadn't sent the money. Her account was hacked, and the hacker was sending the same fraudulent message to her contacts randomly.
I was shocked. I almost sent the money, and I kept imagining how I would have lost that money if I had sent it. I went back to my chat with the scammer and confronted him. He blocked me immediately.
A few days later, Hajia was able to recover her account, but some damages had been done.
When I narrated this experience to my friend, he shared a similar experience where a fraudster scammed him of 20,000 naira under the same false pretence. A friend of his sent him a message to send the money to a third party, which he did because of the close relationship between him and his friend.
Since that time, I don't make use of any information from a friend or anyone that I can reach out to to confirm without doing that. I learned to call and confirm that truly, the owner of the phone number or other form of identity is the initiator of the request sent to me.