No Brainer

The Internet is the place to find just about anything. But it is fast becoming an amalgamation of smoke and mirrors.

Websites are being built one after another. Most of them have nothing original about them. They are nothing by mimic-sites. With the creation of Google's Adsense, webmasters, or should I say glorified spammers, create web sites using content from other sites in order to draw traffic their way and earn money off of clicks and impressions. As more and more sites are created, the Internet slowly becomes a cesspool of the same stuff.
The only way to kill off the mimic-sites is to frequent the sites where the original content is created. To do otherwise by creating laws to stop these sites would infringe on freedoms. Sites with original content may one day be obsolete.

Luckily, creative people are out in the world making sites with original content. But it is only a matter of time before get-rich-quick marketers mirror those sites.

Keep the Internet GREEN! Go for original!

I almost sent out information to a fraudulent company today! I was a click away from having to call my credit card companies, PayPal and my bank to tell them to change my passwords and/or cancel my accounts.

I get emails from fraudulent companies all the time; every single day. I usually catch them, but today was different. It came at a time and was written in a way that I believed it. I had gotten on another computer other than one I own and accessed my PayPal account to show someone about PayPal and its services. The email I got today read like this:

—————-

We recently have determined that different computers have logged into your PayPal account, and multiple password failures were present before the login. One of our Customer Service employees has already tryed to telephonically reach you. As our employee did not manage to reach you, this email has been sent to your notice.

Therefore your account has been temporary suspended. We need you to confirm your identity in order to regain full privileges of your account.

If this is not completed by November 30, 2005, we reserve the right to terminate all privileges of your account indefinitly, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner.

To confirm your identity please follow the link below:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr.php?cmd=_login-run

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

PayPal - Customer Service

Please do not reply to this e-mail as this is only a notification. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered.

For one, I didn’t read all the way through the letter. If I had, I would have seen the spelling errors and become immediately suspicious. But instead, I skimmed through the email missing the first spelling error (tried) and (indefinitly), then clicked the link to access my account and fix things.

I used my account username and password to get into their site, which looked exactly like PayPal’s login page. The first page that showed up was a page asking for my credit card and bank routing numbers. At that point, I wasn’t even suspicious and usually, I am. But because I had just accessed PayPal through another computer and this email touched on that perfectly, I still wasn’t suspicious. I started entering the information and began to wonder why in the world PayPal would be asking me all this information in order to verify who I was. It wasn’t until I checked the domain and saw all the dots after paypal.com

Look at the URL here -> http://paypal.com.login-user5491.info/webscr.php?cmd=LogIn

See all the dots after PayPal.com? That means the actual domain name is login-user5491.info and is being used to fraud people. The dots before login-user5491.info indicate folders under the domain name, which are being used to look like actual domains.

Luckily, I caught this before entering in all my credit card and bank information and hitting the Submit button. But I did log into my account using the false page, so I immediately logged into PayPal and changed my password. If I hadn’t done that, after picking through the list of people that submitted their username email addresses and passwords, they may have actually gotten around to logging into my site and transferred money out to their banks.

So be careful. When you receive an email from a company asking you to submit your credit card or bank information, especially any emails coming from companies you do business with, make sure the web site you are accessing is the correct one. And before you enter any pertinent information and send it to them, you might want to call the company first or type the domain name into your browser to make sure you have the right domain from the start.

If you have a PayPal email that seems suspicious, email the suspicious email to spoof@paypal.com and they will check it out. Also, you can look up the domain name and contact the hosting company to let them know someone is using their services to defraud people. To do that, go to http://whois.com and type in the domain. Once the domain has been found, click Whois Lookup to find out exactly who owns the site, and the hosting company. There will be email addresses available to click and contact the hosting company to report the fraud.