More and more Danes fall victim to scams on the web! That at least is the story in Danish paper Jyllands-Posten (yes, the infamous one) today.
The story focuses on a Dane who was scammed into paying 12.000 Euro for a car that he never received. The buyer allegedly thought the design of the sellers web page "looked trustworthy" and thus payed the money in advance (!!) by transferring it to an Italian bank account.
What annoys me about this story is that it portrays the web as a place where scamming has run amok. Yes of course there is scamming going on. But the case story is actually not about a web scam, is it? Making a guy pay money in advance to a seller he doesn't know for goods he hasn't received, is a scam that has probably been around a little longer than the web :-).
Yes, the web facilitated the scam. But it could probably have happened via other channels as well.
Sometimes journalists are simply a little quick to jump to the popular conclusion: The web is dangerous.
Get the full story (in Danish)
Technorati: Scam | Journalism
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