Phishing, (The act of making a illegitimate site look official, and then spamming people with fake links in SPAM in an attempt to steal customers personal details) has taken a turn for the worse. Since many of our visitors are web designers in e-commerce related fields, this warrants a mention here.
Laptop Bits Ltd, a company in the UK, were surprised recently to discover an almost picture perfect replica of their website operating under a different domain name. The goal obviously being to lure people into paying for equipment that will never be delivered. The only real give away it seems, is the fact that the dodgy site only accepted money transfer, and not credit cards. For online purchases, nothing is better then Credit cards (except possibly systems like Paypal). You can reverse a credit card charge, but once you do a money transfer, the money is gone. Making an exact copy of a site is surprisingly easy, you can actually copy the real site in its entirety, and then change just those parts you want to change. And with the number of free shopping carts available on the net that use templating systems, you can even re-create the entire e-commerce process of the site.
The advice? Well the first thing would be to only deal with companies you know about online. The second is to never make any unprotected payments, if you cannot reverse a payment, then you shouldn’t have made it. Also, obviously you should never follow links in e-mail and always type the address in manually.
TheReg has the full story here.
