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May 26, 2005

Hero of the day

From YahooNews:

Angered by the growing number of Internet scams, online "vigilantes" have started to take justice into their own hands by hacking into suspected fraud sites and defacing them.

These hackers have targeted fake websites set up to resemble the sites of banks or financial institutions in recent weeks, and have inserted new pages or messages. Some say "Warning - This was a Scam Site," or "This Bank Was Fraudulent and Is Now Removed."

I've recently received several e-mails from the Ebay version of this scam, and it's easy to see how someone who didn't know much about the Internets could fall for it. The e-mail looks like an official Ebay correspondence:

You have added phoneseller@yahoo.com as a new email address for your eBay account.

If you did not authorize this change or if you need assistance with your account, please contact eBay customer service at:
http://scgi.ebay.com/verify_id=ebay

Thank you for using eBay!
The PayPal Team

Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. For assistance, log in to your eBay account and choose the "Help" link in the header of any page.

The problem is, the link, the one that starts with scgi.ebay.com, it goes to a completely different IP address. Pretty smart, eh? It takes you to a page that looks just like an official Ebay page, and if you don't look in the address bar to see the difference, you'd never know. You'd give them your password and username, and the next thing you know, they're using money from your Paypal account to buy $10,000 custom-made surfboards. Or something like that.

While some people question the ethics of vigilante hackers, I say, keep up the good work. Analysts say these fraud schemes may result in thefts of one million dollars a day worldwide. That's a lot of money, and all these hackers are really doing is defiling the fraud website. A pretty light punishment for people who deserve to be locked in a room with a rabid badger while wearing a shirt that says 'I hate badgers.'

Posted by Elyas at 10:24 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

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