This is a column for a BBC World Service piece. It’s not Reuters content. Of all the scams you’d have thought the old ‘I’m a general’s widow and am sitting on a whole pile of cash I want to share with you” one would have gone away by now. But it hasn’t. The scammers are… Read More »
An Indian phone company is warning users against a variation on the premium rate phone scam, whereby users are contacted by email or mail and asked to call a number to confirm winning a prize. The number is a premium number—either local or international—and the user has to sit through several expensive minutes of canned… Read More »
Further to my earlier piece about the scamming potential of Web 2.0, here are a couple more examples of why social engineering is a bigger problem than it might appear. First off, governments and organisations are not as careful with your information as you might expect them to. There are plenty of examples of CD-ROMs… Read More »
A few weeks back I wrote about love scams (“You Give Love a Bad Name,” WSJ.com) — how scammers are trawling online dating sites looking for suckers. What interested me about the scam is that in some cases the scammers play a very patient game — luring the mark in over a period of months… Read More »
I continue to be intrigued, but somewhat perplexed, by the CardSystems security breach that happened nearly two months ago now. Who knew it first, and who told who, and when? And why did it take so long to tell the rest of us? A U.S. company claimed it was its software that first spotted the… Read More »