vendredi, septembre 29, 2006  I've been online for quite a number of years now (to say the least), and I consider myself fairly adept at spotting scams from just their email header, but I have to say that this particular scam is rather scary because it would fool my mother, who doesn't do any safety checks when it comes to this sort of scam (she just runs and phones me, which is not a bad idea, come to think of it.)I opened my hotmail account (rarely checked, always used as spam account) on Internet Explorer, and saw an email from Paypal, titled "Dispute Transaction". I DO have a Paypal account, and I have used my cards to pay for stuff online before, so you can be sure this email caught my attention. At first glance, it appears legitimate (see figure 1), showing that I was about to pay US$398 for a camera. However, a double check with the sender's email shows that something is up - instead of having an ebay.com return email address, it has a support@site.com email address, suggesting dodginess.  Since I was reading that email on IE, I decided to open my Firefox to check on my paypal account. Sure enough, there was nothing there - the lone credit card which I had listed had expired anyway, so nobody could possibly do anything with my account.I went back to the email, and clicked on link there. It pops up a page (2nd pic) which looks almost identical to the real Paypal site (3rd pic) - except that many links don't lead anywhere, and the URL bar shows something completely different. Only the "log in" link and the "sign up now" link work. I'm getting very worried now because this is exactly the thing which will trip people like my mother up - by making everything look like the real site, the only things that the average internet user will be able to use to discern if this is a real site or otherwise, is the URL bar, and mouse-ing over the various links.  And yet, even these methods are not foolproof - URL masking is getting more common, and links can be coded to be excluded from the preview bars.Conclusion: BEWARE! And keep your eyes and ears open. [Paypal Fraud] |
0 Comments: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
