Never assume anything online!

The Wild, Wild Web (www) can be a dangerous place for the inexperienced, uninformed and unwary.

Even the most innocent or innocuous request or action can hide traps and risks. Identity theft is the most common risk, followed by insertion of malware (harmful software) that can hand control of your computer to criminals who can link it up to thousands of other computers to form botnets used for spamming, brute-force cracking of keywords, account numbers, usernames and more.

Suckerbait.info is a public service site dedicated to helping you stay safer online — but we can’t warn you of every scam or booby-trap, and you should learn to become self-reliant about protecting yourself. Ignorance is not an excuse.

Criminals will use the classic Five Failure Factors that lie behind every scam, every ruse, every ploy to take advantage of you. Those five factors are…

• Ignorance
• Fear of loss (fear of losing what you already have, or of missing out on what you don’t yet have)
• Greed
• Laziness
• Gullibility (or, if you keep falling for these scams, stupidity)

Study the information in the articles in this section. It will help you to protect yourself more effectively.