Posted: 29th Mar, 2005 By: MarkJ
The Police have issued a new alert to surfers, warning them against the growth in professional looking Internet scams. These usually request private/financial details and often APPEAR to come from businesses such as eBay:
In particular, cops are concerned at the increasing number of people snared by "phishing" scams that appear to be genuine requests for personal and banking details from well known sites such as eBay and Amazon.
Police are also worried about "Second Chance Offer" scams operated on sites such as eBay. In these cases, someone who misses out on winning an auction is contacted later and told the deal has fallen through and offered the chance to snap up the item privately. Although money is sent in good faith, the gear never appears.
Said Inspector Alex Harkness of Fife Police: "The people who are committing these crimes are very professional. They create web sites with links that appear to be connected with the genuine sites, people are then conned into passing over credit card or bank details and money is then stolen from them."We've had a lot of these mails ourselves and it's quite easy to see how people can be mislead, they do everything possible to recreate the image of their target company.
Most businesses will never request confidential details over e-mail, if they do then NEVER follow the e-mails own link(s); go to the site directly and check. More @
The Register.