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Thursday, January 22, 2004
Ng: Danger in cyberworld: To click or not to click
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
SCAMS. The world is a dangerous place, and cyberworld is the same. If the real world has viruses, so does cyberworld. If the real world has scams, so does the Internet.
I guess everybody is aware of the Nigerian scams. These are letters written by purported friends of former high officials with huge amounts of money stashed somewhere. Those who help get the money will get a percentage of it, which can be millions of dollars.
In the last few weeks, stories have been written about certain people in Singapore and the United Kingdom who are still falling for the scam and ending up losing tens of thousands of dollars. I guess the reason why there are still so many such letters (I receive dozens every month) is that they are indeed successful in fooling some people and making good money. So for the nth time, we are warning our readers to be careful.
Another scam involves buying computers or sophisticated equipment with the buyer offering to pay by credit card, or even by demand draft or check. I believe the seller should also be wary about that. Credit card numbers can easily be stolen, and demand drafts can easily be faked or replicated. Since dollar demand drafts usually take weeks to clear, it will be a long time before the seller knows that he has been had. By that time, the items might already have been shipped out.
Of course, every day we get also tens of email pushing Viagra, wonder medicines with money-back guarantees, and free this and that, or even messages that you have won the lottery or a vacation. These scams are obvious enough that hopefully anybody with enough experience will be wary.
However, there is a new scam you need to take note of. There is even a name to it—a “phishing” expedition. So far, these are email messages from supposedly big legitimate companies, like Citibank, eBay, MSN, America Online or Amazon. They will even sport the logos and the graphics.
These messages will tell the person that they are updating their database, and ask if they can please update certain personal information attached to the account. The goal is to get the person to log into the website and get their personal information (like social security numbers, names of children, or credit card information) that will be used to perpetrate fraud or identity theft.
These companies are masquerade as the real companies. If the real website is truecompany.com, they may pretend to be truecompany1.com, true-company.com, or trucompany.com.ph, truecompany.net, or truecompany.us to fool the person into thinking they are the legitimate site of the company.
The other thing to note is that the link they ask you to click on can be read as truecompany.com, but when you hover the mouse over the link, it will show fakecompany.com (which is the real link it will take you to) on the status line.
You should also be careful of long links. For instance, the link may show www.amazon.com@www.-company2.com. You have to note that this link, when clicked, will not take you to amazon.com, but to company2.com.
At the end, be very careful when clicking on offers from companies you don’t know. While we are told to be careful to click because it might introduce viruses into the system, we should be equally concerned that when clicking on the website, the site might load spyware into the system to get more information from the user that they will ultimately use to defraud him.
So it should not only be viruses we should be careful about. The best advice is: If you are not sure whether to click or not, don’t.
(Wilson can be reached at wilson@ esprint.com.)
(January 22, 2004 issue)
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