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Date Posted: 07:07:42 05/30/04 Sun
Author: Repost
Subject: Don't get hooked when e-mail scammers phish

Don't get hooked when e-mail scammers phish

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Henry Gilgoff

May 30, 2004


Now I know what it's like to be baited like a fish on the Internet.

Actually, my wife was the target of what appears to have been a scam that is carried out through cyberspace and known in techno-terminology as phishing. An e-mail sent to her Monday through our home computer told her tersely: "need information to continue membership." The message identified the sender as the "AOL Billing Department" and directed my wife to a Web site.

But America Online spokesman Nicholas Graham said AOL does not ask for a password or billing information by e-mail. The company gives that caveat through online notices that previously caught my attention, so the message to my wife was suspect from the start.

Graham said he was not aware of that message, but he has seen others like it. After I faxed him a copy, he said, "This is most certainly a scam. This is something I've referred to our fraud investigation unit." He said AOL seeks to have Web sites of imposters shut down. For whatever reason, the site connected with the e-mail to my wife was not available when I tried going there several days later.

Even educated and longtime users of the Internet can fall victim to the scam, which can rely on e-mail replies as well as bogus Web sites, Graham said. A fraudulent e-mail may refer a potential victim to a Web site that looks like the real thing. "It may look like AOL," he said, "but if they're asking for that kind of information, they are not AOL."

Citibank is another household name that has been used by online scammers. Nassau County District Attorney Denis Dillon issued a warning last month about e-mails telling recipients to click on a link and give their "Citibank ATM/ Debit Card number and PIN number that you use in the ATM machine." The goal, the warning said, was to elicit enough information to steal from a customer's account.

Stephen Treglia, chief of Dillon's technology crime unit, said that phishing seems to be occurring more frequently. "They get your personal information and can either access those accounts or create new accounts [including credit card accounts] with the information you've provided them." Treglia's advice: "If they're coming to you and requesting information, do not provide it."

Federal Trade Commission lawyer Patricia Poss, who recently worked on a settlement of phishing charges against a Queens teenager, said tracking wrongdoers on the Internet is just one difficulty law enforcement agencies face. She urged consumers not to click on any link in a suspicious e-mail. Ignoring that advice, she cautioned, could open a computer to any number of problems, including a virus.

Poss said consumers can report an e-mail they suspect is part of a phishing scam to the company being impersonated and to government agencies, including the FTC at www.ftc.gov. The e-mail also can be forwarded to the FTC at uce@ftc.gov.

Phishing became enough of a concern at Citibank last fall to prompt it to post an alert on its home page, www.citibank .com, with advice on avoiding the scam and reporting e-mails that seem fraudulent. "The issue here is not anything that we instigate or control other than to let our customers know that these aren't anything that we'd ever issue," said Citibank spokesman Mark Rodgers.

A gauge of phishing's impact came through survey results announced this month by Gartner Inc., a research and consulting company in Stamford, Conn. A Gartner report on its online, national survey of 5,000 adults in April described the fraud as a "cyberattack" in which a trusted company is impersonated by somebody who sends a bulk message, typically by e-mail. Recipients are directed someplace, often a Web site, to give personal information.

"Our report shows that phishing is more than just an annoyance," the study said. "It is an effective, profitable form of crime."

Nineteen percent of survey respondents said they had received an e-mail that looked like a phishing attack and 27 percent said they "definitely" had been attacked. Three percent of the respondents in both groups "remember giving the 'phishers' sensitive financial or personal information, such as a credit card number and billing address, by filling in a form on a spoof Web site," the report said.

The Web sites that were simulated most frequently, according to survey respondents who said they received e-mails that looked like or were in fact a phishing attack were eBay (30 percent); PayPal, eBay's payment service unit (29 percent), and Citibank (14 percent).

Its own findings and other data, the report said, indicate that "phishing attack victims are more likely than nonvictims to have their identities stolen and used illegally by criminals for financial gain."

The potential economic danger goes beyond people whose identities are stolen and businesses that sometime absorb the losses, according to Avivah Litan, Gartner's research director for payments and fraud. Phishing, she said, will slow the growth of Internet commerce by eroding consumer confidence unless more safeguards are implemented. The report recommended adoption of new measures by service providers to help customers distinguish them from imposters.

Concerns about security, Litan said, represent the "main deterrent to doing more on the Internet," and the Gartner report added a sobering assessment. "Consumers," it said, "have a right to be nervous."

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