Abine

It’s no secret that there’s a vast, ambitious, creative, and cunning collection of cybercriminals, hackers, thieves, and scammers who seem to haunt those on the internet. Many are looking for weaknesses to exploit and opportunities to steal peoples’ information and money. Thankfully, there are many steps people can take to avoid cybercriminals and protect themselves against scams. One step is to keep your information secure and private, including learning how to remove personal information from Google searches. Unfortunately, there’s an insidious collection of scams and cons that prey on otherwise shrewd and cautious internet users in the most devious and cynical way—by appealing to their decency. The following describes a few of these scams and how to avoid falling victim to a costly scam for trying to do the right thing. Sick Baby, Sick Pet, and Troubled Vet Hoaxes The “sick baby” and “sick pet” hoaxes are far older than the internet but first spread online via...

Identity theft can have broad and far-reaching implications on your personal, financial, and professional life—immediate ramifications and longer-term consequences. It’s an incredibly distressing, disruptive, invasive, and often destructive event that no one should have to deal with. For those unfamiliar with the nightmare of identity theft, the following describes some of the ways in which it can continue to disrupt and even sabotage a victim’s life well after the event itself. The good news is that there are tools and strategies you can use to increase your privacy and remove personal information from Google that could otherwise be used by identity thieves. The Money Lost and Credit Consequences No doubt the most common, well-known, and immediately detrimental consequence of having your identity stolen is the financial cost. Identity thieves have a number of underhanded strategies they use to steal from you, including: ● Accessing and emptying checking and savi...

Have you spent any time at all on social media sites, in chat rooms, comment threads, discussion sites, or anywhere else that people congregate online? If so, there’s a good chance you’ve been subjected to some degree of online harassment, shaming, or cyberbullying.  Thankfully, there are steps you can take to, at the very least, minimize the amount of shaming or cyberbullying you have to deal with on the internet. That can range from modifying online web-surfing habits to taking proactive steps like learning how to remove personal information from Google searches. Don’t Feed the Trolls It’s an internet cliché but one of the more accurate, insightful, and important ones: Don’t feed the trolls. If you encounter a bully online who takes a specific interest in you, the worst thing you can do is engage, however tempting it may be or frustrating the bully is. Keep in mind that trolls are, virtually inevitably, angry and insecure people who glean satisfaction fro...