It can be an e-mail from the widow of a recently deceased Nigerian prince asking for your help in disposing of $5 million.
It can be a message from your bank stating that it needs some personal information so that it can update your account.
Or it can be a seller on eBay who’s offering supposedly authentic Tiffany & Co. jewelry at unbelievable prices.
These are prime examples of the online fraud that seemingly lurks behind every unexpected e-mail and many Web sites and that experts say has grown more prevalent in recent years.
“Whenever you have a new technology, at some point there are going to be people who are going to employ that technology for evil purposes,” said Jeffrey J. McConnell, a Canisius College computer scientist.
The fraudsters, scammers and phishers — more on that later — who populate the online world are part of the downside that comes with the rapid growth of the Internet in recent years.
It’s a serious issue, with computer security experts saying that there are millions of victims worldwide who have lost billions of dollars to online fraud. There were more than 1,700 in one year in the Buffalo Niagara region, federal data shows.
The Internet didn’t create this problem, which is really a shift by criminals to the Web because that’s where people live their lives and conduct their business today, experts say.
“The effect of the Internet is to make it much cheaper for scammers to send out solicitations. This means that scams that formerly were unprofitable because the response rate was so low are now profitable,” Eric Rescorla, chief scientist at Network Resonance and an adviser for Voltage Security, said in an e-mail interview Thursday.
This online fraud relies on, and in turn threatens, the trust that is needed for any online transaction and that is the basic…