With the advent of the internet, fraud also came in a different form – Internet scam or Online fraud. Our post on Internet Scam Statistics shows that it is on the increase.
Out of the very many initiatives that exist to keep abreast of the latest Internet Scams, there are two I would like to inform you about.
The first is from Nigeria, which is erroneously referred as a Internet Scam Capital. See Internet Scam Statistics to show you the true picture. It is an initiative from Co-Creation hub (CcHub), Nigeria’s first open living lab and pre-incubation space designed to be a multi-functional, multi-purpose space where work to catalyze creative social tech ventures take place.
CcHub developed Wayopedia (pronounced Wah-Yo!-Pee-Dia), a crowd-sourced repository of scam keywords and phrases, in a bid to create an intelligent scam email identification system. (And for those who don’t know, wayo is a Nigeria term for scam.) The team aims to train WayoPedia into an intelligent repository able to identify words and phrases used by humans to deceive. The repository now has over 2000 words and phrases captured such as initial deposit, beneficiary, bank, inheritance and western union. The team has gone further to publish a weekly online digest “Wayopedia Weekly” which details online scams around the world.
The second initiative is Scam Detector. The Scam Detector is an award-winning smartphone and web-based app that exposes over 600 of the world’s most fraudulent activities. It was created after the outstanding success of The 419: The Nigerian Scam, a short film which quickly became a viral hit, being viewed over a million times online. Scam Detector has officially partnered with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) serving the Great White North. Every week, BBB provides a Top 10 list of the latest scams in every industry.
