Phishing – Never Give Your Credit Card Details

If you are fed up with all the spam that you receive through your computer, then some good news has been brought to us on that front and it is good to see that Microsoft are coming down hard, on the mister big’s that are behind it.

It has been revealed that in the past month, THE biggest spammer in the world was dragged through court by Microsoft and due to the severity of the costs that Scott Ritchter had to give back to Microsoft ($9 million) for using the Internet to send unsolicited e-mails, leaving him bankrupt and now shut down for good.

This is great but there is a far more dangerous Internet scam in working right now, which will put the annoyance and threat that spamming ever did into the shade, it’s called Phishing and it consists of crooks setting up bogus websites and use the Trojan computer virus, which builds in strength and gets smarter, with every computer that it ransacks and with the bogus websites set up, the crooks will send an e-mail, which will ask you for your personal details, as with the system being down, they have lost al the information that they had on you and need it to get the system and your account back up and running again.

The crooks will give you the email address of the real bank or credit card company and when you send off your information, with, the help of the Trojan your info will be redirected to a bogus site, which is made to look like the official, bank or credit card website, which in turn they will be able to use the details you have given them in identity fraud against you.

Though don’t think that Microsoft is currently only worrying about spammers, far from it as they are currently in the process of prosecuting 119 phishers at the moment and the work that had to go into catching one phisher is astronomical at times, as in one case the trail to one, went from the UK to Eastern Europe and eventually landed in the bedroom of a 19 year old American kids bedroom.

The one way that you can help in the fight to protect your personal details from identity fraud of this kind, is to not reply to any e-mails that you have received asking you for your details, as this would simply not happen, as your bank, building society or credit card issuer would not ask for you to send your details this way, as they have a back up system to deal with any shut down of they’re computer systems.

If you do receive any e-mail of this kind, contact your bank, building society or credit card company that the e-mail has been aimed at, to confirm that all is well, though do use your telephone.