The Features And Reasons Of Digital Deception

INTRODUCTION

Deception can be portrayed in various ways throughout human history and can be track back as early as World War II or Trojan War. (Michail Tsikerdekis, 2014) People do certainly enjoy when they see a magic trick but no one want to be tricked into a situation where they will lose their belongings or even worse, identity. Deception is an act to misguide others where the targets may or may not aware of such acts and the act of transferring a false belief from the deceiver to the target. (Michail Tsikerdekis, 2014) The main characteristics of digital deception can be divided into two. The first one is the deceiver is aware with his deception and must be deliberate. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) Messages that are conveyed without our conscience are not count as deceptive. Secondly, the deception is created to misguide and create false belief to the deceived. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) Based on some studies, it has been found that human beings tell one or two lies a day averagely. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) We tell lies to family, friends, partner, or even our superiors but is there a line that separates normal lie and lie that is classified as legally and morally wrong? This line has become more blurry as technology developed thus creating more way for deception to happen and the most distinct one nowadays is digital deception.

Technology is one of the human revolution benefits but with a great creation also come a great burden. The birth of the internet further spark human civilization and the concept of deception were also brought to the online world. In 2018, there are numerous ways of how content is generated and exchanged through the internet. Users in social media increased day by day as the creation of an account is as easy as ABC, but the act of deception also increased by the ease of getting an account. (Michail Tsikerdekis, 2014) Digital deception can be defined as the intentional control of information in a technologically mediated message to create a false belief in the receiver of the message. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009)

Digital deceptions share the same characteristics as the normal deception. However the full concepts are aided by one more characteristics which is the information of a deception is manipulated through a technologically mediated message. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) The message must be sent via communication technology such as email, chatroom, social media account and must be other than basic face-to-face setting.

WHY

There are lots of reasons why people lie online but the most constant variable is to gain something for themselves out of people suffering. A major reason why a soul wanted to commit digital deception is of course to gain money. When money is in the line, the sight of a sane person become blurry and all they can see is fortune. There are some cases where people lie online to get money out of desperation but the actions can never be justified. Making money online, or fast rich scheme is another way to trick people to think just buy a few clicks they can be instant rich. There are no shortcuts or easy way to generate money but there are still people that fall into this trick and regret the decision to join in the first place. One of the reasons is to steal data from an individual or an organization. For an individual, data stealer may try to steal username, password and financial information. (Cameron H. Malin, 2017). However for organization, data is stole to gain access to a network. The data stolen will be probably sold to the highest bidder in the black market or to other organizations. Data acquired from an individual may be used by the internet fraudsters for information or illegal software. (Cameron H. Malin, 2017). This also can be identified as identity theft, another reason of why digital deception happens. One can use other identity to do many bad things online. The hacker can disguise themselves as someone else and create a fight between a community and ventures into illegal website. There are also organizations that hire this hacker because they are not doing so good and they need to crush their competition. Organizations could lose their stocks, business strategy, employee data and many more. High reputation companies such as Google, Adobe or Yahoo are also a victim of data breach.

The other side of identity fraud is identity concealment. This can be understand where one hid or alter their identity when going online to protect their own identity. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) Identity concealment occurs with the conscience of an individual for many reasons. Woman for instance use identity concealment to avoid getting harassed and men use it to showcase more about themselves. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) The essence of identity concealment is basically the ability for a person to become another version of themselves when going online. This can also be a crime when people use this method to commit credit card fraud or stole money from others.

How

Methods of digital deceptions have evolved parallel with the evolutions of technology. More tricks are been created and the older one is been improvised so that the authorities will not be able to detect and catch the culprit of this unmoral doings. Some of digital deception in business context is it can happen through masking, where important information of a product is disregard. Dazzling; hiding important information of a product. Decoying; taking the target attention away from the transaction. Mimicking; tricking a target to believe that they are doing a legit transaction. Inventing; creating a false information about a transaction. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009)One of the concept is message-based digital deception where the messages is been manipulated to be deceptive. (Jeffrey T. Hancock, 2009) This is maybe the lowest reason of why people commit digital deception as we ourselves may commit it on daily life. For example when we text our friend saying that we will be late to a meeting when in fact we were just about to get ready. However, this type of deception also could not be underestimated when we are dealing in more serious topic such as economy or political area.

One text message or phone call could jeopardize a politician reputation or a nation economy system. A message that contains a gift to a politician can be classified as a bribe and his or her competitor can use that message against them. Many years ago, data only come in the form of paper. With the emergence of the internet, data now can be stored in the form or 0 and 1. Cloud storage is a familiar term when we talk about online data storage. The risk of this storage although the manufacturer equipped the system with security protocol is of course the potential of getting hack. The term of hacking is manipulated through several ways such as phishing or watering hole attacks. Phishing is the act of obtaining personal and sensitive of and individual or organizations. (Cameron H. Malin, 2017) Phishing messages is usually believed to be legitimate with the information such as in emails are seem to be convincing. The way of the text is been constructed, links and attachment seems legit when it is not actually. Watering holes attacks on the other hand is basically the act of diversion. The culprit make the target believe their system are been attacked on one sector and while they are busy repairing the corrupted sector, they went to another sector and stole data from there instead. (Cameron H. Malin, 2017)