Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails Soliciting Information
What does this post have to do with online marketing? Any online marketing resulting in a sale requires a payment processing company. Some choose Authorize.net, their local bank, or a third party processor like 2checkout.com or PayPal. Any online payment processing system will expose you to fraud risk because they require you to enter personal financial information online. I hope this post will help you identify scams and become a wiser consumer of online payment processing services.
Recently, several people have sought my advice regarding emails that came to their inbox soliciting information regarding personal finances such as credit cards and bank accounts. The company the email represented was highly trusted and so some responded more openly than perhaps they should have. These unfortunate ones are victims of a clever identity theft technique that has been dubbed “phishing.”
Though the most commonly misrepresented companies are PayPal and eBay, email phishing scams are also attempted for any market that a criminal decides to target.
The scam is, in general, quite simple.
- Gain access to customer correspondence from the target company such as eBay or Paypal.
- Steal the graphics and re-use them in your own email.
- Most importantly, mask web addresses with fake URLs. Here is a simple example that uses PayPal’s address but points to my company’s Web site: http://www.paypal.com
- A variation on the masked URL is the solicitation of financial and personal info in a form contained within the email message body.
Some things to look for then are masked URLs, forms embedded in email body text, and any email requesting financial information the company you are dealing with should not need or already has obtained from you via their secure Web site.
I’ve covered some of the absolute basics here. These guidelines should help you begin to assess risks from email, but more resources are needed.
PayPal has posted an excellent page that offers a great deal more information and very useful visual aids at https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/general/SecuritySpoof-outside
December 12th, 2005
