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Just say no to Phishing
Along with the Internet have come many new opportunities for fraudsters to make easy money taking advantage of the uninformed public. Phishing is just one of the methods that scam artists have come up with to steal your personal financial information. In this scam, the criminal works on the law of averages. They send out literally millions of phony emails to unsuspecting consumers in hopes that even just a few
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Did You Know...
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The word phishing comes from the analogy that Internet scammers are using e-mail lures to fish for passwords and financial data from the sea of Internet users. The term was coined in 1996 by hackers who were stealing AOL Internet accounts by scamming passwords from unsuspecting AOL users. Since hackers have a tendency to replacing "f" with "ph" the term phishing was derived.
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respond with their personal and financial information.
Along with the Internet have come many new opportunities for fraudsters to make easy money taking advantage of the uninformed public. Phishing is just one of the methods that scam artists have come up with to steal your personal financial information. In this scam, the criminal works on the law of averages. They send out literally millions of phony emails to unsuspecting consumers in hopes that even just a few respond with their personal and financial information.
There has been a rash of recent phishing scams that have been highly successful in obtaining card numbers and PIN information from consumers. The email is portrayed as a legitimate message coming from PayPal requesting card and PIN data from their legitimate service users. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks about why PayPal would possibly need your PIN number. Once they have this information, the phisher can produce a counterfeit card and use it to withdraw funds from the unsuspecting consumer’s account.
The bottom line in this is that no legitimate business or financial institution will ever ask for your account information via email. Your card issuer already has this information and would never ask you for it. In addition, there are many card issuers that may hold their cardholders partially or fully responsible for fraud losses in this type of scenario. The logic behind this being that the cardholder provided their account information, albeit unbeknownst to them, to the fraudster thus authorizing them to use their account as they see fit. It really is no different from you giving your card to a friend or relative so that they can make a purchase on your behalf.
You may report false or misleading emails to the Federal Trade Commission at www.ftc.gov/spam.
-Chris Dirmann
Security Coordinator
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