New Breed Of Cybersquatters Stealing Info
from the and-so-it-goes dept
It seems that every day we hear about more sophistacated frauds online. The latest trend is for cybersquatters to register names that are very close to well-known sites, and then use them to set up a replica site which will capture your user information, and sometimes your credit card. This was the strategy employed by a company last year who set up a PayPal fraud site where they replaced the lowercase letter “L” at the end of PayPal with the number one – which is almost indistinguishable in many fonts. While sometimes people go to these fraud sites after mistyping where they want to go, the creators of the sites often use an even sneakier method to fool users. They do what they can to get themselves listed on search engines – so people feel that the sites must be legit.
Comments on “New Breed Of Cybersquatters Stealing Info”
"Cybersquatters" going the way of "Hacker"
Looks like the media is once again perverting an already established word…these folks aren’t “Cybersquatters”, a word set aside for those who register a popular name in hopes to make money selling it to the rightful owner. These folks are con-artists, working a game of classic fraud using technology. It is no different than me calling you up on the phone and telling you that I am calling on behalf of the Police Benevolency Society, asking for a donation to help with the annual Police Officer’s ball. In doing so, I am fraudulantly associating myself with a large number of legitimate organizations in order to make a quick buck.
Same game is being played here. The con-artists are setting up a look-alike site in order to associate themselves with the real site.
I’d love to see the media occasionally check the technical encyclopedia to make sure they are using the right word…otherwise a Cybersquatter is going to end up standing for the same thing a “Hacker” currently stands for (thanks to the media,) “a criminal who uses computers.”