Scammers on ITV 18/5/15

[Tools]

Scammers
Today on ITV from 9:00pm to 10:00pm
A look at the dramatic increase of cyber crime in Britain, a problem so worrying the government is secretly putting millions of pounds into new specialist units to catch these 21st century crooks. Scamming is the new burglary and is currently costing the UK economy an estimated 27 billion pounds a year. The film reveals some of the heart-rending stories of victims who have fallen foul of the scammers including a woman who fell for a romance scam which cost her 180,000 pounds. One teenager tragically committed suicide after being scammed by a crook pretending to be the police.

[Boycie]

Re: Scammers on ITV 18/5/15

I have to admit that I do despair Tools.

Now and again the government itself announces that access to benefits and services will become internet access only, obviously forgetting that many elderly people have no internet access. Helpfully one major UK company is advertising on TV that they will teach the elderly to use PC's (presumably only if they can afford them) and give an example of collecting voucher codes to save money. Knowing that many of the voucher code sites are thinly disguised scams, spam harvesting sites or something worse, it might be better to offer off piste ski lessons.

I have spent over a year collecting details of vehicle dealers who have had their websites compromised by scammers and you'd imagine them to be the sharpest business minds in the UK. This includes back street dealers and major national dealers and I'm aghast at how easily they can be duped.

Unfortunately, like banks, unless it leads to a direct and immediate loss of money to them, they appear unconcerned, even though it puts the consumer at great risk of fraud. The problem is, and I spend a lot of time and effort trying to make sure that their scams yield nothing, a criminal who has hacked a car dealer doesn't need to be a genius to work out how to exploit the hack in a manner that will focus on defrauding the dealer.

What surprises me most is that I haven't seen any example of them doing this, though there are enough fraudsters attacking UK companies using a method that would be easier with control of a hacked account. I suspect that the criminals just don't possess the knowledge and experience to exploit their hacks - but eventually they will learn.

If I mentioned one simple way, an awful lot of car dealers would understand quite how vulnerable they are. Being a responsible person I won't describe it, but I am not especially intelligent and they will do this in the future if they're not doing it already. As much as the government may be content to allow the public to be defrauded, if companies go down or financial systems become compromised, that will be something that cannot be ignored.

[Boycie]

Re: Scammers on ITV 18/5/15

Having eventually managed to dissuade my own mother from getting on the internet after a long battle I mention this story to show the risks, though this doesn't relate specifically to the internet.

http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/pension...1363981886118?

19 May 2015

Pensioner dies of ‘stress’ after mail scam plagued her with 30,000 letters and took £50,000


A woman has told how her 83-year-old mother was cheated out of her pension by scammers who threatened her with back luck if she didn’t pay up.


A woman has told how her 83-year-old mother was cheated out of her pension in a mail scam that saw her receive 30,000 letters and robbed her of £50,000.

To encourage elderly people to get on the internet, and quoting the access to money off codes as the reason, is recklessly foolish in my opinion as it will inevitably lead to a tidal wave of phishing mails, hack attempts and viruses that even an expert would have difficulty handling and, as demonstrated in my last post, even the smartest UK businessmen are ridiculously vulnerable to this type of attack.

If a hacker can get access to an account held by a person or company that has their card details attached, it isn't rocket science then to take the next step and access those details. Even though not immediately accessible, a simple prompt is likely to be successful to a victim who has already fallen victim to the first hack.

I have uncovered a fully 'cloned' functional fraudulent website of a major UK company and, apart from its use to access login details, it would be perfect to use to collect any information input by the victim. The site merely has to prompt to re-input card details and the job's done. I'm just amazed that so may car dealers are as vulnerable as the average pensioner.