Remember the so-called fictious Allen Smith of Friendster? Yes, the chain messages that were circulated via Friendster messages and bulletin telling you to forward to at least 10 people or have your Friendster account removed. It seemed to have stopped some time ago when disgruntled users in a tit-for-tat posted messages telling people not to forward those messages and even Friendster admin published an FAQ on the issue.
However, the Allen Smith messages resurfaced recently with more and more gullible people falling to this trap. However, this is not as serious as being gullible to email scams. With email scams, your gullibility may cost you your bank account or any e-commerce access. It is well known that such email scams sends spam in bulk and disguise as a mail from your bank requesting you to login to update your e-banking password and ATM PIN.
In the above case, unsuspecting users would click on the URL provided in the email and redirected to a fake website of the bank. The fake website looks almost exactly similar to the actual bank website, and the URL shown in the email looks like its from the actual bank, but actually redirects you to a web host in Russia or other countries. The gullible user will then fill in the username and password and perhaps ATM PIN number if requested. Instead of accessing his bank account, the host captures the login and ATM information and have it stored in database which will then be used for malicious purposes. Usually, after entering the information, the user will be redirected to the actual website.
How can one differentiate a fake website from a real one? Now, all e-commerce transactions must be secure transactions. One way to differentiate is to look at the protocol used. All secure website used the secure HTTP protocol, which results in the https instead of http. Besides, one should also be aware of the actual domain name of the bank, and be sure the URL accessed is correct. For instance, if your banking website is www.xyzbank.com, make sure the URL is https://www.xyzbank.com/… (notice the slash at the end of the domain name, which might be followed by the full path) and NOT http://www.xyzbank.com.server.ru/.
Some browsers like Mozilla Firefox displays the location bar in yellow when accessing secure websites. This helps to alert you that if the color of the location bar is white when accessing a supposedly secure website, you may be in trouble.
Hence, it is important that all Internet users should learn not to be gullible. Start by NOT believing on chain messages via email, instant messenger, social networking sites, etc. If such a simple guideline could not be followed, some day you might end up cheated by such scams that affect your bank account.
