I took it upon myself to make a habit of asking people a few questions about their online internet habits after I fell victim to a financial fraud that I can only think came from a computer data leak or hack. What I found was that most people that have suffered a financial fraud online appear to have been regularly connecting to the internet using public WiFi.
At first, my line of questioning came out of curiosity but then turned into a full-on case study. I managed to sell my research too and still have it for sale for anyone interested. A company in Italy that use the keyword vpn gratis on Google Ads were my first customers. I searched quite a few companies like this because they sell VPN software.
What Did The Financial Survey Set Out To Achieve?
In the beginning, this was not a mission to make money from my research. However, I realized there are no results on the internet for public WiFi and financial fraud. All I was able to find was a small amount of information warning people about the dangers of using public WiFi networks. See the free VPN here.
In the end, all I wanted to know was how many people use public WiFi, then this turned into an investigation about how many people use VPN software when they connect to a public WiFi network.
What Were The Results?
I found that 97% of people connected to a public WiFi network. Out of the 3% that don’t use public WiFi, none of them had ever experienced any kind of financial fraud on their accounts, which was quite interesting. I also asked how often they use their home WiFi and 4G on their smartphone, which the answer was as often as possible. The results here speak for themselves.
Out of the 97% of people that do use public WiFi, 46% of them had experienced some kind of financial fraud which derived from the internet be it a fraud on their Apple Shop, Google Play account, eBay, Amazon and so on.
That means 54% still connected to public WiFi and are yet to fall foul of internet fraudsters. What was surprising was how many of those unaffected by financial have been using VPN software. I did not ask them how long they have been using the software, which in hindsight I wish I included that question.
Cut a long story short, 62% of the people using public WiFi and had not been defrauded use VPN software. On the other hand, out of the 46% that have been defrauded 100% of them did not use VPN software on public WiFi networks at the time they were defrauded. Half of the people in this group did not know what a VPN is.
Now the results here show that there is a direct correlation between using public WiFi networks, those that use VPN software, and those that do not and how often financial fraud has taken place. Now, this was only a small sample of people here, but you can see that if I expanded this sample we can reasonably assume the figures will grow in trend with the survey I instigated.
It would be great to get a survey going to over 1,000 people and revisit my original sample results, so watch this space because I may just well update this post in the future.
