JABAR EKSPRES – An observer of digital culture and communication from the University of Indonesia (UI), Firman Kurniawan, warned that fraudsters in the digital space often take advantage of the comfort and negligence of potential victims to achieve their goals.
“It’s called social engineering. Our comfort, our curiosity, our carelessness, are all exploited by these fraudsters,” said Firman, Wednesday (6/7).
According to Firman, digital technology is actually far from safe because many people are deceived by social engineering, where fraudsters manipulate the psychological side of potential victims to gain access to data or information.
For example, fraudsters send a message that the potential victim will receive a gift before their birthday and ask the potential victim to confirm their location.
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For this reason, Firman also suggested that people increase their vigilance by not only relying on the emotional side, but also rationally. Otherwise, fraudsters will easily break into personal data and information, even accounts.
“We need to think, is it really our birthday? Then, there are people who say they want to give gifts or not?” he added.
Not only in messaging applications, people should also be more careful when surfing social media. This is because fraudsters also often smuggle in challenges circulating on social media.
“For example, on Instagram there is a challenge like what was your photo like when you were in elementary school? Then everyone displays (their photos). This is utilized (by fraudsters), slipped in challenges such as what is your signature, what were your parents’ names before marriage, and so on,” said Firman.
Apart from the public, Firman said vigilance must also be increased by institutions. The reason is, many fraudsters claim to be certain institutions when launching their actions.
“For example, the police. They send a message ‘You have been ticketed, here is proof of your ticketing photo image, please open the application,’. Now the agency needs to announce that it has never issued a ticket or an invitation to use the APK,” said Firman.
