VISA Scam

A nice little VISA scam showed up in my mailbox a couple of days ago. It was just like a million others floating around, though ingeniously done, that asked for me to click on a “Continue” button where it would take me to a website and have me verify my VISA info. The “social engineering” of this one consisted of it purporting to be from VISA and that this was a security check; and, indeed, it was. It just wasn’t the security check it would have you believe it was.

I would say I doubt if there’s anyone who doesn’t know by now that if any e-mail arrives asking you for personal or financial information, it needs to be treated as suspicious. But the fact that these things keep arriving and people keep falling for them says that not everyone understands that, yet. And they’ll keep showing up until everyone does and sending them becomes not worth the risk of being prosecuted.

To respond to the note, I surfed over to the VISA website where I located the real VISA address where their security folks reside and forwarded the e-mail to them along with a note detailing when and how I had received it. I received a response within hours saying that they had already contacted the authorities and were pursuing the source(s) of the note. It also explained how helpful it was for folks to forward stuff like this to them. They depend on us telling them this is going on.

The cool thing about the Internet is the worldwide community it creates. Like any community, though, it contains folks who don’t have their act together and seem to feel that the only way they can make a living or find happiness—and the two are often mutually exclusive—is to take advantage of or hurt others. In the long run, scam, spam, and other abuses of the Net hurt the Internet itself since they provide fodder for more regulation, more security, and more governmental intrusiveness. A lot of reports compare the Internet to the Wild West; remember, the West was tamed.