17 February 2010
This is a form of white collar crime. Internet fraud is a common type of crime whose growth has been proportionate to the growth of internet itself. The internet provides companies and individuals with the opportunity of marketing their products on the net

This is a form of white collar crime. Internet fraud is a common type of crime whose growth has been proportionate to the growth of internet itself. The internet provides companies and individuals with the opportunity of marketing their products on the net. It is easy for people with fraudulent intention to make their messages look real and credible. There are innumerable scams and frauds most of them relating to investment schemes and have been described in detail below as follows:
Online investment newsletters
Many newsletters on the internet provide the investors with free advice recommending stocks where they should invest. Sometimes these recommendations are totally bogus and cause loss to the investors.
Bulletin boards
This is a forum for sharing investor information and often fraud is perpetrated in this zone causing loss of millions who
bank on them.
E-mail scams
Since junk mail ( E mail which contains useless material ) is easy to create, fraudsters often find it easy to spread bogus investment schemes or spread false information about a company.
Credit card fraud
With the electronic commerce rapidly becoming a major force in national economies it offers rich pickings for criminals prepared to undertake fraudulent activities. In U.S.A. the ten most frequent fraud reports involve undelivered and online services; damaged, defective, misrepresented or undelivered merchandise; auction sales; pyramid schemes and multilevel marketing and of the most predominant among them is credit card fraud. Something like half a billion dollars is lost to consumers in card fraud alone. Publishing of false digital signature .According to section 73 of the I.T. Act 2000, if a person knows that a digital
signature certificate is erroneous in certain particulars and still goes ahead and publishes it, is guilty of having contravened the Act. He is punishable with imprisonment for a term that may extend to two years or with fine of a lakh rupees or with both.
Making available digital signature for fraudulent purpose
This is an offence punishable under section 74 of the above mentioned act, with imprisonment for a term that may extend to two years or with fine of two lakh rupees or with both.

Alteration And Destruction Of Digital Information
The corruption and destruction of digital information is the single largest menace facing the world of computers. This is introduced by a human agent with the help of various programmes which have been described in detail below as follows:
Virus Just as a virus can infect the human immunity system there exist programs, which, can destroy or hamper computer systems. A computer virus is a programme designed to replicate and spread, generally with the victim being oblivious to its existence. Computer viruses spread by attaching themselves to programmes like word processor or spreadsheets or they attach themselves to the boot sector of a disk. When an infected file is activated or when the computer is started from an infected disk, the virus itself is also executed.
Published in Legal service india
Authors : B.Jyoti Kiran & Shiladitya Goswami