The darkest corners of the Internet are booming with help wanted ads looking for hackers who are fluent in foreign languages, such as Mandarin, Russian, and Chinese. If written poorly, scams like email phishing and grammatically incorrect web pages make it difficult to trick people in other countries into revealing their financial information. So what’s a hacker to do? They recruit, they need to ensure their spam looks authentic.

To target a specific countries biggest market, one needs a hacker that speaks that countries language. To use a metaphor, the bad guys see the Internet as one large piñata, they thrash it with every tool they can to see if and where it will break. What’s a crime to you and I is a business in the eye’s of an Internet criminal.

Unfortunately online scams are becoming more sophisticated, as David Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee says that only a few years ago spam was poorly written and less believable than it is now, but now it’s becoming more difficult to tell what is real and what is not.

The best advice is also the simplest. If something sounds too good to be true it is. Also keep in mind that any financial institution will never ask for private information through email. Never… click on any links in your email, even if it is from someone you know. It has become trivial to spoof email.

More often than not, common sense is all that is needed to protect yourself from a majority of Internet criminals.