March 28, 2005
iranian.com

Ask Tourang a technical question

Email fraud

Once in a while I receive these emails in broken English from Prince of Gamibia (a small African nation that nobody has ever heard of, claiming that his father left a 2 million dollar fortune and that he needs my help getting this money out of the country. Subsequently he needs my bank account number to deposit this money into or $5000 in cash would be fine too. As ridiculous as these emails sound, I have heard that some people have actually fallen prey to them and ended up giving up their bank account numbers to these criminals who took them to cleaners.

Recently, I received a newer type of email which caught my attention. It goes like this:

Dear eBay Member,

We regret to inform you That During our regulary schedule account maintenance and verification we have lost on year 2004/2005 manny dates of eBay users , to recover your possibilites to join eBay update your credit card on file.

To resolve this problems please update your credit card on file and login to your account in order to resolve your account problems. If your problems could not be resolved your account will be suspended for a period of 3-4 days, after that it will be again operational. Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us. Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This includes the registering of a new account.

You are required to verify your eBay account by following the link below:
//signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn&ssPageName=h:h:sin:US

We appreciate your support and understating, as we work together to keep eBay a safe place to trade. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Respectfully,

Trust and Safety Department
eBay Inc.

So how can you tell that this email is not authentic? After all the link is //signin.ebay.com which would make me think that it's really coming from ebay! Not true.

Anyone can register domain names close to legitimate companies. For example I could go online and register the following domain names: <//account.ebay.com> <//signup.ebay.com> <//profile.ebay.com>, etc. none of which has anything to do with eBay. Once someone clicks on these links, they will then be taken to the site belonging to scam artists not ebay. After that, whatever information you enter (including your credit card number, etc.) is going to get stored on their databases.

The first thing you should notice is when viewing these types of emails, is that they are asking for your credit card information. That should immediately sound some alarms in your head because legitimate companies don't ask for your credit card information like that.

Here is one more sure way to find out if there is actually a fraud going on. Most probably other people have run into the same problem you are running to now. So a nice and easy way to make sure you are not being taken for a ride is to search on the net for the subject line you received with your email.

Being curious, I went to www.google.com (or www.yahoo.com) and I searched for "FIP NOTICE: eBay Registration Suspension". This was the subject line of the email I had received. Sure enough, thousands of links showed up with titles like: "Be alert: FIP NOTICE: eBay Registration Suspension fraud"" EBay Scams arrive by e-mail, avoid being a victim ..."

Looking at these links, it's easy to tell that this is a known email scam and others have exposed them already. In short, never give out your credit card info, personal info (like social security number) without doing a bit of research before hand.

Tourang

Reader email

Mehrdad writes:

Hi Tourang,

I read your piece on PDF files and I would like to add a few things to what you wrote:

1. you do not need to buy Adobe Acrobat in order to create PDF files. PDF creators such as PDF995 (//www.pdf995.com/) can be downloaded free of charge.

2. Basically in order to produce a PDF file you need to produce/write/create your document using whatever programme/application needed to create that document this could be Microsoft word, Excel, Autocad, front page, Paint shop pro, or in short any application. If You were creating a document with persian text in it you need to write the text using your favourite Persian text application. PDF creators are like virtual printers, so after writing your document you choose Print and from the list of the printers on your sysytem you choose the PDF printer. Of course you need to install the PDF creator application eg. PDF995 or Adobe Acrobat first. So creating a PDF file is like printing a document and nothing else. You will not be able to create a document with the PDF writer application alone.

3. There are some limited editting you can do with your PDF creator applications but these are as I said very limited.

I hope this sheds some light on this subject.

Ghorbane shoma va ba arezuye sali khoobDear Mehrdad, Thanks for the correction and contributing to that piece. You are right. You can create your PDF document using your favorite word processors, etc. (as long as these applications have the capability to
produce or export to PDF files).

Thanks again and happy new year.

Tourang

Email your computer questions (all kinds of questions are welcome -- even personal ones, not!) 

About Tourang Birangi
-- Bachelor of Science, 1984, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
-- Worked for 6 years, developing and designing process control circuit
boards in Denver, Colorado.
-- 5 years of firmware development with Motorola microprocessors.
-- Master of Science, 1995, Computer and Information Sciences, Cleveland State University
-- 15 years of software design and development, architecture, object
oriented programming (including close to 10 years of C, C++, Java).
J2EE design and development on both Windows and Linux operationg
systems. Experience with Websphere, JBoss, Weblogic application
servers.
-- Recent work with C# and .Net.

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