SOFIA, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Naive or careless people have still been misled to pay large amounts of money to online fraudsters, a Bulgarian cyber security chief said here on Wednesday.
"Fraudulent shopping sites are the easiest scam that is circulating on the Internet," Svetlin Lazarov, head of Cyber Intelligence and Digital Forensics at the country's General Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (DGCOC), said during the Security of Digital Payments conference.
These websites offered goods at much lower prices, Lazarov said. Unfortunately, on the Black Friday at the end of last year, DGCOC has registered many cases of people who were cheated by such sites.
"You cannot get for free something that costs a lot of money," Lazarov warned.
The so-called romantic scams were another interesting type of fraud, he said. The DGCOC received complaints about such cases every day.
Deceived people have paid a lot of money to rescue "princes from Africa" or "generals from the Middle East" and let "their loved ones" come to Bulgaria, Lazarov said.
"These are extremely tragic stories because one sometimes spends all their resources to rescue someone who does not exist," Lazarov said, adding that it was a business model that "unfortunately continued to work".
The third interesting scam, which has been circulating constantly, was the man-in-the-middle fraud, or interception of corporate emails and deceiving companies to transfer money to bank accounts of fraudsters instead of to their real counterparts, Lazarov said.
He recalled that last year, Bulgarian authorities have revealed two big financially motivated cyber attacks worth 5.2 million U.S. dollars in total against a "large company" in South Korea and a U.S.-registered legal entity respectively.
