http://www.cybervictims.edu.tf/
Cyber media has become a good platform to do varieties of business including money laundering from innocent victims. We all know about the Nigerian phishing scams: a superb hi-tech way to get easy money by duping innocent people who take such false promises of sharing “blocked account” of huge sum of a dead account holder as true as Veda and get duped themselves. Well, I understand these are ignorant people who have more greed to get easy money than the understanding and observation power of these nasty cyber traps. But what can you say when these brilliant crooks nab the wise men, the professors, researchers or graduate students? The finest way to fool these wise men is to allure them to publish their research papers, be key note speakers or present their works in front of international academic communities. There is no hassle for peer review of the articles or risk of being rejected due to “low standard” of the work ; the organization name looks very genuine and the committee chair man always carries a smart “Dr.” in front of his name . Such overnight Ph.d holders sometimes create a perfect geographical map to show the exact venue, put up pictures of their institutions, very serious classrooms and a brochure of their institution. All “the wise men” have to do is, pay through their credit cards or online transfer modes to get their seat confirmed and papers published. However, the story doesn’t have a happy ending for the “wise men”, but definitely for those self claimed chairpersons and secretaries of “made up” academic institutions who, after receiving a good sum suddenly disappear from the world. The “participators” begin endless wait to receive the acknowledgment note and finally only when the due date arrives they understand the reality.
There can never be a bigger mockery than this, of the hard work for recognition of one’s academic intelligence. I have seen bright people from the academic world including the Engineering, Medicine or science departments to be duped like this. Suddenly the anger and frustration of these poor souls gets diverted towards the law and justice machinery and the reporting authorities, who in many cases fail to understand how the intelligent, wise people like the professors, senior students and even some professionals can fall in these pitches. The nature of the crime remains bizarre; the distraught victim makes the whole case more confused by self analysis of the whole situation (which often turns out to be a perfect motivation for deep depression) and the local police station (who can often be ill equipped to understand as well as deal with such cases), fails to balm the pain of the victims due to these confused state of affairs. Well, truly speaking, the victim finally has to be the looser as he not only looses his money but also precious result of the hard brain work. What could be more painful than this?
But the question which larks in our mind is can we prevent such crimes?
On a casual conversation with Jayne Hitchcock, President WHOA ( www.haltabuse.org) , I felt the victim could very well prevent such “phishing” victimsation if he / she controlled his /her greed to get “bad money” in an apparent good and easy way. In my opinion, same advice goes for victims of academic –cyber fraud. I being a researcher myself, can understand a rule or two for academic publications which I prefer to share here.
· Give your research paper for peer reviewed journals for publication.
· Check the website of the journal thoroughly.
· Check out the past issues, volume numbers and the archive.
· These journals will periodically call for papers submission.
· Certain institutions or departments who run journals belong to good academic institutions.
· Generally these journals or even book editors do not ask for payment from the contributors. They call for papers and it is peer reviewed.
· If you get to see any call for seminar or conference by any organization, other than well established renowned ones , you must go for a thorough scrutiny of the organization, website and even the venue.
· Never give your credit card numbers or even bank account informations.
· Consult other fellow academicians about the credential of the said organization if you suspect it may not be genuine.
· However, unfortunately if you get duped, immediately register a case with the local cyber crime police branch. Do not try to police the whole affair yourself.
· Finally, be wise, observe the current state of cyber crime affairs and prevent such sorts of nasty money making business.
