Tag Archives: Fraud

Beware the SMS Premium Number Scam

An Indian phone company is warning users against a variation on the premium rate phone scam, whereby users are contacted by email or mail and asked to call a number to confirm winning a prize. The number is a premium number—either local or international—and the user has to sit through several expensive minutes of canned… Read More »

Social Engineering, Part XIV

Further to my earlier piece about the scamming potential of Web 2.0, here are a couple more examples of why social engineering is a bigger problem than it might appear. First off, governments and organisations are not as careful with your information as you might expect them to. There are plenty of examples of CD-ROMs… Read More »

The Puppy Love Scam

A few weeks back I wrote about love scams (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” WSJ.com) — how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game — luring the mark in over a period of months… Read More »

How Long Did The ‘Biggest Data Theft In History’ Go Unreported?

I continue to be intrigued, but somewhat perplexed, by the CardSystems security breach that happened nearly two months ago now. Who knew it first, and who told who, and when? And why did it take so long to tell the rest of us? A U.S. company claimed it was its software that first spotted the… Read More »