Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: scam

  • WaveEgreetings.com Scam? or Legit?

    This afternoon I received an email that said the following…

    Welcome to Midwave Products LLC!

    Congratulations Avery,

    This e-mail is to confirm your recent/successful WaveEGreetings.com
    order! Log in online and get instant access to hundreds of E-Greeting
    Cards!

    Billing Telephone Number: **********

    As part of your service with the WaveEGreetings.com program, you will
    receive:
    Unlimited access to ecards for every occasion!
    Send greetings to your friends and family.
    Create unique and personalized greetings.

    Your WaveEGreetings.com account can be accessed by going to
    www.waveEgreetings.com/login.asp and entering in your username and
    password below;
    username: ****************
    password: *************

    For your convenience you will be billed a monthly fee of $14.95 on your
    local phone bill for the phone number you provided which is **********.
    Although, there is no affiliation with your local phone company, these
    charges will appear on your local telephone bill on the Transaction
    Clearing bill page as being billed on behalf of Midwave Products, LLC.
    There is no long term contract and the service can be cancelled at any
    time.

    If you have questions or concerns and need to contact customer service
    just simply reply to this e-mail and we will be happy to assist you.

    You can cancel the service by calling 866-982-3699or by emailing us at
    support@waveEgreetings.com and include your home telephone number or
    simply reply to this email stating “cancel”. Or write us at PO Box 17598
    Suite# 77145, Baltimore, Maryland 21297-1598.

    Thank you and Congratulations on joining WaveEGreetings.com

    Sincerely,
    WaveEGreetings.com Customer Support
    —————————————-

    AT&T ENDUSERS:You have the right to dispute the Midwave Products LLC
    charges billed on your local telephone bill. You are not legally
    responsible for Midwave Products LLC charges incurred by minors or
    vulnerable adults without your consent. Your local telephone service
    will not be disconnected because you fail to pay a charge by Midwave
    Products LLC except that nonpayment of certain regulated
    telecommunication charges may result in disconnection of service in
    Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina and
    Tennessee. Enhanced Telecommunications Service Providers may employ
    other agencies to collect delinquent charge, even if your local phone
    company has previously adjusted them from your telephone bill.

    My first thought was that this was a phishing email and I checked out the links in the message and the site of waveEgreetings.com because….

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  • How To Remove Alpha Antivirus (Removal Guide)

    There is a new rogue among us. It appears that Alpha Antivirus has replaced Personal Antivirus as one of the latest rogue security programs. This particular rogue installs through online “scans” (popups.) The reason I say “scans” is they’re essentially animations of a scan (every one that visits the site will see the same thing even if you visit from a non windows OS which is somewhat amusing…) But, those details could certainly be changed. Who knows someday they may randomize their animations of scans and alter them to match other operating systems if they start to get fancy. Anyway, like many of the rogues that we’ve been covering their goal is to scare you into downloading and then paying for Alpha Antivirus by providing scan results that appear to indicate a security problem with your computer that only they can fix if you pay. In addition to this “fun”, Alpha Antivirus also drops a password stealing trojan. Those online banking passwords are more valuable than the fee for this software I suspect. Read on to see how to remove alpha antivirus.

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  • Network administration over the holidays

    Nobody wants to be tied to their job over the holidays, but what if someone has hacked your servers and is using your machine to scam thousands of people a day? Does that keep for two weeks? Does someone monitor the abuse address? Incidents.org has a post on messages they’ve got from some reporting to abuse administrators receiving back vacation notices that things are basically on “autopilot until sometime next year.”

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  • Another example of how we’re vulnerable for identity theft

    The SecurityFix is reporting on a security breech at reevesnamepins.com a company that supplies (among others) law enforcement personnel. Apparently, CardCops (which monitors for possible stolen data), discovered names and addresses of several law enforcement officers from across the country. The common denominator seemed to be recent orders at reevesnamepins.com and the company has confirmed a recent security breech.

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  • Takedown phishing sites

    Sunbeltblog has a good post on a group that helps “take bad guys out”. The Internet Crime Provention and Control Institute (Link expired). Basically, they will take submissions of complaints and assist in getting sites taken down. A good example would be phishing sites, maybe servers hosting illegal content, stolen information, etc. etc.

    Or, perhaps a machine is spewing out viral, nigerian 419 scam or other material. That’s what the ICPCI is there to receive complaints on and coordinate “takedowns”. According to the sunbelt entry (a tip from a reader), they’re pretty effective at the takedowns (even when the site is hosted in places you would think makes it tougher.)

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  • Registrars not verifying contact information on domains?

    According to a GAO report one of the reasons that phishing and scam websites are because of a lack of enforcement and policing by registrars of accurate contact information. According to their study over 5% of sites had been registered with false data. ~2.5% had been registered with incomplete information. These findings come from a random sample of 300 domain names that they then did lookups on the domains.

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  • Barcode Scam to get $4.99 iPod

    A Colorado University student was arrested for a barcode scam after trying to buy an iPod for $4.99 (with a fake barcode) at a Colorado Target store. Apparently the scam was successful once and he came back a second time. Basically he used a barcode printing program to duplicate the barcode for a cheap item, then pasted the “new improved” barcode over the legitimate one. According to the article, he sought out female checkers that he guessed would be less likely to pay attention to the electronics at such a low price.

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  • Beware emails that sound too good to be true

    A new phishing scheme is promising tax refunds in the amoutn of over $500 to recipients of the scam. Sophos has an advisory. It looks pretty devious – asking people to type in the link address (or copy and paste) and using URL redirect to make it use an official site to then redirect to the phony site.

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  • FBI nabs Zotob and Mytob authors

    I’m impressed, it looks as though the FBI has announced the arrest of the authors of both the Zotob and Mytob viruses. Of course Zotob was in the wild in the last 2 weeks. This is really very good news as it is rare for virus writers to be identified and captured. Maybe the FBI has honed it’s ability to track these guys?

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  • Phishing test…

    So, I’ve talked a good deal about phishing scam emails and I had to read when I found this article at the sunbeltblog. They posted a link to a site with some tips on phishing, as well as a “test your phishing smarts” kind of test at mailfrontier.com.

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