Dot-Con

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What Does Dot-Con Mean?

Dot-con is a term for fraud that occurs in an online or digital environment. It can be used for many different kinds of fraud and is a play on "dot-com," a term that is often used to refer to anything related to the Internet.

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Techopedia Explains Dot-Con

Journalists and others have used the term dot-con when referring to mass phenomena, such as market trading mishaps, data theft or credit card fraud. The term has also been used to refer to the now infamous tech bubble of the budding 21st century global market. In this instance, dot-con refers to large numbers of investors that lost money in tech-related trading and the sudden re-evaluation of tech companies.

Other references to dot-con may be specific individual instances, in which a consumer, investor or group of people are conned. Some of these are related to the faceless aspect of e-commerce, where scammers can easily bilk customers and set up fraudulent transactions. These types of fraud vary widely, from phishing attempts to the sale of poor quality goods or solicitation of money for goods and services that are never provided.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.