One of the things which had continued during one moment in the arena of Domain Name is a company which sends the postal sending to replace your Domain Name. The problem is, they are not the company which you currently recorded your Domain Name with.
While somebody called this a swindle, they suppose to say that it is not a swindle in the true direction of the word, supposing they provide really the services of renewal which they offer, but the sending are incredibly misleading, and to resemble an invoice to replace the Domain Name of owners. If the proprietor of the domain doesn’t read the letter carefully and just sends in the payment, they get committed to a new provider when they didn’t intentionally do so. In the way these lettering presented are meant to do just that, mislead the owner of the domain in to switching to their service, at what is usually a much magnified cost over what the domain name proprietor is presently paying. A similar thing took place a number of years ago in the telephone industry, and was subsequently made illegal. This was known as slamming in the phone industry.
More number of people has received a number of mailing like this, being that they own quite a few domain names. They come with different company names in the top of the letter, but they all are strikingly similar in format, and they all have a similar or even exactly the same return address in New York State. Some common names they use are Domain Registry of America, Liberty Names of America, and Domain Renewal Group.
The finer print does say “THIS IS NOT AN INVOICE”, but it’s buried in so much other text you can easily scan over it. In fact, it’s not yet bolded or in capitol letters like the phrase put here. They are even “nice” enough to offer to register other extensions of your domain name for you; at four to five times the price you can register it yourself through most places.
If you receive any of these, our advice is to throw them in the trash immediately. While you can certainly renew or transmit your domain names to any provider you wish, it should be your choice on your own initiation, not a scam mailing like this trying to trap you in to switching for a higher price.
Police are warning Cayman Islands residents about another telephone scam that will not make them rich. The bogus text message, which is currently being sent to LIME cell phones, claims that the recipient has won money in an ‘ongoing GSM FREE BONANZA’. The recipient is asked to email a gmail account to claim their winnings which, needless to say, do not exist.
The Royal Cayman Islands Police Service (RCIPS) and the telecommunications company say they have been made aware of the message scam which reads: “CONGRATULATIONS!!! (mobile number) have won EUR 470,000 in the ongoing GSM FREE BONANZA, for claim, Email: maxgestores@gmail.com or call +34-669295736.”
Inspector Angela McLean of the Financial Crime Unit said as yet the unit had not received any official complaints and was hoping to keep it that way. “All residents are urged not to respond to the message if they receive it,” she said.
LIME Country Manager Tony Ritch also advised customers not to respond to this as it is mobile phone SPAM, effectively an unsolicited bulk message that has been sent to potentially thousands of our customers. “We did not authorize or send this message, it is a hoax,” said Ritch. “We also want to let the public know that we will do everything we can in such instances to identify those responsible and report them to the relevant authorities.”
Anyone with information about crime taking place in the Cayman Islands should contact their local police station or Crime Stoppers on 800-8477 (TIPS). All persons calling Crime Stoppers remain anonymous, and are eligible for a reward of up to $1000, should their information lead to an arrest or recovery of property/drugs.
McAfee’s (www.mcafee.com) security techniques research division, Avert Labs, has released its second monthly spam report, which “E-ticket” airline scam, misuse of free hosting services, and the increase of Chinese spam have topped the security provider’s list of online threats.
According to McAfee’s Spam Report - February 2009 (Link to the Report), the last month has been the area under discussion to a highly effectual airline email malware campaign that scam activities users into giving away their personal information. The subject line begins with “E-ticket” followed by a number, and the mail body appears to confirm the acquisition of a paperless airline ticket. The McAfee document said this is a “intellectual bit of social engineering that relies on the fear of having one’s personal details (identity) stolen,” leading sufferers to click on the attached file without thinking, leading them to download the file that infects the system with the ZBot Trojan.
Another major style that has increased in the last month is scammers hijacking spaces on Microsoft’s live.com. “We took a sample of libido-enhancing spam more than a period of 48 hours and found all of it contained URLs pointing to Windows live.com sites,” the report said, and at the same time they note down that Microsoft had already disabled 13 percent of the related links, even given their attention, 87 percent of these sites remained active. In addition, the Microsoft name offers the appearance of legitimacy.
At last, McAfee made note of a fashion that has been long in the creation due to the rising Internet use in Asia. With its rise in number of users, China is overtaking the US spam racket in supplying the world’s spam. According to the state-controlled China Internet Network Information Center, China is on the way to quickly overtake the US in the number of Internet users. These computers are necessary to be infected by malware, which are used to spread spam messages.
Most interesting thing is that China’s overall amount of zombie computers is down, and McAfee said it’s not clear what’s happening in China, but the huge amount of infected systems are no longer being used for that purpose.
“Although Chinese computers are not being used for spam they way they were last year, we’re seeing a resurgence which is now putting them in the lead, ahead of the US,” McAfee Avert Labs senior vice president Jeff Green said in a statement. “Also, although these zombie computers aren’t being used for spam, you have to wonder if they’re being used for another purpose.”
In January, McAfee launched its first spam report (Report for January) in a monthly series that promises to chronicle spam trends and specific campaigns.
There’s spamming, there’s fishing … and now there’s “swatting.” Swatting is considered a new type of telephone fraud that can be quite dangerous.
The perpetrator deceives 9-1-1 systems into thinking a crime is in progress – one so serious that it requires SWAT teams to respond to homes where nothing is happening. It not only results in a waste of time for police, but an intimidating situation for clueless homeowners.
In one instance, a teenager manipulated a system to trick 9-1-1 operators into believing a murder had taken place. A SWAT team showed up and woke members of an innocent family who were subsequently handcuffed and forced to the ground. The victims were chosen at random.
