Tips to help avoid becoming a victim of Cybercrime 3 of 3

Don’t respond to unsolicited e-mail

You did not win a lottery, get a job with an international bank, or inherit $10,000,000 from someone you don’t know. Don’t answer those e-mails, or anything else offered from an unknown source.

Likewise, banks, financial institutions and government departments will never ask you for sensitive information or to confirm passwords via e-mail. Phishing scams are e-mails which pretend to be from banks or internet providers and ask you to click through to their sites and enter personal data. Don’t.

If you get an e-mail that informs you that, say, your bank wants to update your password so you need to click on a link in the message and type in your old one, or that a government agency wants to confirm your social insurance number, ignore it. Call your local bank branch or the government department if you want to check the authenticity of the request (using numbers from the phone book, not those from the e-mail in question), but never enter sensitive information online in response to an e-mail.

Det.-Const. Fenton says he’s amazed at how many people still fall victim to these kinds of cons. "I’ve had lawyers, doctors, engineers call me to say 'my Viagra never got delivered' after they ordered it by responding to an e-mail. How do you deal with people like that?"

Network with care

If you’re active on any online social networks, be careful what information you reveal.

Cluely says that in a study of Facebook users, 25 per cent disclosed their full address on their online profile, and 78 per cent gave a home phone number.

"Some of these people will then actually announce to their network that they’re going on holiday," he says. "You think, what are you doing?"

Use caution on public computers

Never do any sensitive business like banking on public computers, whether it's a public terminal or a machine at an internet cafe. There could easily be software that steals your information as you’re typing, sending it off to identity thieves.

It's also a bad idea to conduct sensitive transactions using a public WiFi wireless hotspot. Unencrypted transmissions can be monitored, and even "secure" encrypted links can be cracked.

The best advice? Don’t take anything you see on the web at face value.

"The problem is that people today just aren’t paranoid enough — they aren’t acting carefully," Cluley says. "It’s as if the motorcar had just been invented and everybody went racing down the freeway without taking any lessons."