MUSCAT: If an e-mail from your beloved friend or relative whom you haven’t contacted for quite some time informs you that he is in a foreign land and his wallet was lost and makes a distress plea to send some money so that he can get out of the hotel where he was held for non-payment of the bill, and assures you that paying you back would be the first thing that he would do as soon as he reaches back, think twice before you panic. It must be a hacker’s call to victimise you by relieving you of your money and pride.

Before grabbing the car key to rush to the fastest sending money system in the locality with an earnest wish to help him out, call the person’s local contact numbers and make sure that you’re not falling to be the prey of an unscrupulous crook’s ploy. We received such an SOS from an assistant professor of a leading government college
in Oman, who is a reader and contributor to the Observer, wanting $1,800 to pay off the hotel bill in Perth, Australia, where she was holidaying for the past few days, after graciously excusing for not informing us before she left.

Apprehensive at the mail at the outset, we contacted the educator’s local GSM number only to find that we were not the only one to call her and check the fidelity of the mail but almost all the contacts in her mail box had contacted her to inquire if she was in Oman and if she needed money. One of her cousins in Los Angeles was about to send the required money to Australia, but on an intuition, he made a call to her mother-in-law in Karnataka to confirm the incident thinking that there was no point in contacting the alleged victim in Oman.

According to the professor, it all happened so when she received a mail last week from ‘Windows.com’ informing her to send her all e-mail IDs and passwords as part of their clientele upgradation. Having accepted the need as true, she parted with all her mail IDs and passwords with the bonafide belief in the mail. Hackers played the wreck and now she is not even able to access her mail box apart from causing serious fraudulent misrepresentation online.

Tariq al Barwani, Chairman, Knowledgeoman.com and Online Manager of Nawras, advises people not to entertain any suspicious mails in your inbox and even if it seems to be from one of your contacts but subject line needs to be checked and if it is suspicious, to delete them immediately. “See, people are naive and they trust others which is good but it will be taken for granted and be extra careful while using Internet” Tariq, who won the ‘Most Valuable Professional’ by Microsoft for the third time consecutively and the only Omani to win this coveted title, emphasises on the constant upgradation of all your anti-virus, spy-ware and all Internet security tools on a regular basis.

“Besides, do never share your password with any one and your e-mail ID with strangers. A regularly used password can be known to others; so keep changing your password every week or so, after all it takes a few minutes, yeah?” Tariq said. Now, the victim of online hacking has created a new mail ID and is informing all her contacts gathered from the business cards and other back up data with her and is sending SMS en-masse to all known people not to deal with her previous e-mails anymore.