Beware: phishing is on the rise |
Loading ...“Phishing” doesn’t involve boats and water, but it does involves hooks and consumers. It is the term that applies to the various email cons to get legitimate users of a service to visit a bogus site and give out their sensitive personal/account information like: usernames, passwords, credit cards, addresses, social security numbers. Here’s a common sense solution: don’t trust any email correspondence asking for your information. Go to the website that the email supposedly came from and file a complaint and then as this article says, forward the email with headers to the FTC.
I work in tech support for a web hosting company and I see a lot, lot, lot of this going on, particularly with phony eBay pages that do actually log you into eBay, but also capture your login. People are lured by forged email messages that say something like “There has been a technical problem and we need you to log into your account in order to re-activate it. Click here to log in.”
The layout and verbiage are generally the same, indicating to me that someone is selling scam kits. Or else the scammers are stealing them from each other. Who knows?
Comment by Spring — July 25, 2003 @ 1:41 pm PST