Signs of Hurricane Gustav scams surface
Photo by: Dyobmit
Internet security experts have put up a red alert on a possible surge in Hurricane Gustav related scams after nearly 100 sites cropped up within last Sunday registering themselves with the words “hurricane”, “Gustav”, “charity”, and “relief”. They believe this could be a sign that fraudsters are setting up shop to pull off different types of scams.
Experts believe fraudsters can con in different ways using such websites. Simply, they may obtain donations from the general public and then go missing with the money. Else, they could run a website to obtain personal financial information like bank account/credit card numbers and social security numbers of visitors. Even email addresses collected in this manner can fetch them money by way of selling the addresses to spam advertisers. Some sites can also be setup to collect such information covertly by downloading malicious programs onto logged-in computers.
Authorities believe most websites registered recently are for illegitimate purposes. Upon scanning them, they found only a few amongst them, leading to genuine charities. Most of the others were being resold for profit in auction sites like eBay. Also, many of them did not bother to have any content featured on them. These suggested that the domain owners were not folks with charity on their minds.
Internet watchdogs are raising the alarm in view of what happened in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of scam sites appeared, then, and attempted to con people out of their money and identity.
Source: ComputerWorld.com
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