New Spam Trick From Internet Scamsters

Published: Wednesday, March 15, 2006 Online-Casinos.com

NEW SPAM TRICKS FROM INTERNET SCAMSTERS

Con men are after your credit card and banking details

Several new phishing strategies surfaced this week, serving once again to remind Internet users to be alert and cautious with their private information, especially as regards financial instruments.

In the first, a California man was arrested for allegedly attempting to steal the personal information of about 30.000 people through a forged phishing SPAM email targetting eBay users.

Anti-virus firm Sophos reported that 21-year-old Ali Shekafroush, a Riverside Community College student was arrested after a 14-month investigation by the department's high-tech task force.

Shekafroush allegedly sent some 30 000 Spam emails that claimed to be from eBay but re-directed users to another Web site. The bogus site would then ask users to submit their personal information. Sophos says phishing scams extend well beyond banking sites, with PayPal and eBay being among the most popular guises for phishing attacks.

In another incident, a Web server owned by a state-operated Chinese bank was being used by hackers to host phishing sites targeting American banks and financial institutions, according to a report by Internet research group Netcraft.

Phishing spam emails sent this month targeted customers of Chase Bank and eBay, directing the gullible to sites hosted on IP addresses assigned to The China Construction Bank Shanghai Branch, in what Netcraft says is the first instance it has seen of one bank's infrastructure being used to attack another institution.

The Chase scam duped its victims by offering a chance to earn $20 by filling out a user survey asking them to submit bank information so that the $20 can be deposited to the proper account. The survey also requests its victim's user PIN number, card verification number, mother's maiden name and Social Security number and password. The data is then relayed to a free form processing service on a server in India.

The third, and deeply concerning scam involves phone calls in which the caller clearly knows a great deal about the victim already, and uses this to try and get the victim to give up PIN or three digit identity numbers on the rear of his or her credit card.

The fraudster calls and identifies himself as a member of Security Investigations at either Visa or Mastercard - he even supplies badge and control numbers that sound official. He appears to already have the issuing bank and card number (possibly from a skim merchant or illegal sale) and tells the victim that his or her card has been flagged for an unusual purchasing pattern. By asking questions that show he already has the victim's personal information he attempts to extract from the victim critical information like the numbers on the rear of the credit card.

http://www.online-casinos.com/ readers are warned that under no circumstances should they divulge this sort of information, even to plausible sounding callers.