Recent reports in the press have highlighted a disturbing new scam by criminals trying to coerce us into handing over our financial details.
Given the term ‘vishing' (as opposed to ‘phishing' - whereby fraudsters pose as financial institutions over via the net or email), this latest attempt to defraud the public uses net phone systems.
Many different scams have been discovered but they are similar in that they use Voice over IP (Voip) technology. For example, security company WebSenses found that one scam involved the perpetrator adding an 0800 number in an email message that was sent out asking recipients to call and update their bank details.
If the number is dialled, users will hear a recorded message which asks them to enter their account details with the phone's touch pad. By using both email and telephone in conjunction with one another, these scams are appearing to be more legitimate.
An email and phone scam discovered by anti-virus firm Sophos targeted the net payments service PayPal. Those signalled out by the hi-tech criminals were asked to phone to update or confirm their account information.
The chief technology officer of Newports Networks which sells Voip technology, believes that,
“We've fixed that partially through educating users,” he says but goes to state that firms operating over the net need to implement their own security measures to combat this new crime. Since many net service companies already have a blacklist of Internet addresses that are known senders of spam, it would make sense to distribute a list of those places that host vishing scams. Any call is then blocked before it reaches the user.
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