The Scam Alert Blog

It looks like scammers are trying to come up with better sounding phishing and hoax emails. It appears that there is an underground network of scammers that are hiring people fluent in english to write or re-write their phishing and other hoax emails. This mean that you have one less way to spot a scam email as it may no longer stick out because of the broken english. Stay one step ahead of the game and check out any business or organization on the internet before you open their emails or enter any transactions with them.

There is yet another banking scam making the rounds. It seems people are calling or contacting people through email and asking them to take a survey about their banking experience. Eventually the questions get down to account numbers and other sensitive information. Don’t answer these questions. This is just another case of scammers trying to separate you from your money. Contact your bank, in person if possible, to verify or report these scamming attempts. Protect yourself, your finances, and your identity.

It seems that scammers are always on the lookout for an opportunity to make a buck. Tickets have appeared online at Ebay and other locations for the upcoming Hillary Clinton - Barack Obama debate in Texas. One problem, there are no tickets being sold. The site is opened to invited guests plus a total of 100 “tickets” will be available through a drawing held by the Texas Democratic Party. So, if you see someone… anyone… offering tickets to the debate. There’s no doubt about it - its a scam!

Here is a story of a guy who says he received a counterfeit $100 bill from his bank. He is now out the one hundred bucks. Pay attention and don’t trust anyone when it comes to your identity or your money.

At a time like this, when a famous person is in the news, be careful of the sites you visit to get information. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated earlier this week and it appears there are already scammers out there that have set up sites related to her, but the true motivation behind them is to gather personal information to be used in identity theft.

We have always known that scammers are the lowest of the low… remember, they will not stop at anything in their attempts to separate you from your money.

Please, double and triple check any site that asks for your personal or account informaiton.

Russian programmers have come up with what is referred to as CyberLover. CyberLover is a program that will go into multiple online dating sites and chat with people as if they are looking for a date. The company advertises that it is a way for busy people to meet others online but not waste all that time chatting. Security experts say that the real purpose is to get people to divulge personal information in an effort to steal their identity.

Here is the story of one “alleged” scammer who is accused of selling trampolines and then not delivering them, but keeping the money.

Customers of Regions Bank, primarily located in the southeastern United States, were the recent target of an online scam performed using a computerized telephone call.

Bank customers were called and asked to verify their banking information online and given a website to do so. Of course, the website is fake and just a way for a scammer to gather people’s usernames, passwords, account numbers, and more. The bank has urged all customers who received this call to call or come into the bank.

Full story is here

While this particular scam was confined to customers of this specific bank, be warned that this could happen to you as well. If you ever receive word to verify your account information online… please confirm with your financial institution first if the message came from them. Don’t let the scammers win.

Be Careful What Rights You Sign Away

How many people in today’s internet dominated world truly understand what they are doing every they check a box that says something to the effect of “yes, I have read and understand the user agreement”.

Most of the time when someone does this they are simply agreeing to harmless stipulations that protect the website/company from meaningless lawsuits, but sometimes people haven’t thought through what the stipulations they are agreeing to mean.

Take for example the case of Allison Chang a 16 year old from Dallas, Texas who had her picture taken by a friend at a church sponsored car wash. That friend uploaded the photo to Flickr, Yahoo.com’s popular photo sharing website, to share with friends and unfortunately the entire world. Flickr’s user agreement allows one to share photos with other users or Flickr itself with few strings attached.

Along comes Virgin Mobile, a popular cellphone company, who downloads the picture of Allison and totally without her knowing it uses it in an advertising campaign in Australia. What started out as Allison having her picture taken and a friend posting it online has turned into Allison’s face being plastered on billboards all over Australia with a slogan superimposed on it that she claims is embarrassing.

A lawsuit has been filed by Allison’s family against Virgin Mobile and Flickr.com and it remains to be seen what will come of it. On the surface it appears that the companies stuck to the letter of the agreement that the user confirmed when posting the photos. The two main points raised by this situation are:

Can person A enter an agreement to license the image of Person B without Person B being a party to the agreement.

And…

Be very careful and read the terms of service agreement before sharing anything personal online. It may seem inconvenient, but you should be sure you agree with the terms before clicking anything saying that yes, you in fact do agree with the terms.

Photo and file sharing whether a service like Flickr, MySpace, or Blogger is still a relatively new technology and phenomenon. It remains to be seen what the effect on individuals and society will be ten years from now when there is a vast public record of people’s images, thoughts, feelings, ideas, and statements. One thing is sure, there will be a lot of people regretting what they posted online.

Based on a Microsoft survey, here are some findings regarding online scams:

So, stay vigilant… with knowledge and awareness, we can defeat the scammers.