The truth is out there, but disentangling it from the
scams is more than Simon Moores can do.
Paranoia caught up with me last week. I had been reading
about the next wave of phishing scams, when an e-mail arrived in my
Hotmail account confirming a seat had been reserved for me to see
Ladies in Lavender at a cinema in Finchley and that my
credit card had been debited £15 for two tickets by the Vue
Cinema's online box office
Finchley is about 100 miles from where I live, I had no desire
to see Ladies in Lavender and who, I wondered, had used my
credit card. Alarm bells started sounding loudly in my head and I
was tempted to call the 08712 customer service number on the
e-mail, which stated, “If any of the details shown are incorrect
please call customer services.”
At this point, I decided that it had to be a clever fraud. The
first thing anyone is going to do is call the number and if this
happens to be a premium rate line, then someone, somewhere, will be
making a great deal of money from spamming a few hundred thousand
e-mail accounts in the UK.
My next step was to call BT and ask if the phone number was
indeed a premium rate line. The operator confirmed it was and
suggested a call to telephone regulator Icstis, so my suspicions
seemed justified.
The next step was to call Visa and then the National Hi-tech
Crime Unit to report what looked like a clever fraud. But the
latter very efficiently confirmed that the phone number was indeed
that of the Finchley Road cinema and not a premium rate line, which
rather left me wondering why the BT operator thought it was.
The police called the cinema manager, who in turn confirmed that
a booking had been made in my name and with my e-mail. Both Visa
and the cinema then assured me that my own credit card hadn’t been
used but didn't know who the owner of the credit card for the
booking might be.
I’m now looking rather embarrassed. I’ve involved the police,
BT and Visa and I’m still no clearer why someone has booked a
cinema seat in my name and with my Hotmail address.
There is however a moral to the story because there are several
quite similar frauds in circulation. Frighten the e-mail recipient
into calling a premium line in Colombia and before the authorities
can act, the bad guys have collected their money and moved on to
the next scam.
The real message here is that confidence in the online medium,
at least on my side, is declining fast. Instead of a trusted
environment the internet is increasingly viewed with suspicion
unless the e-mail recipient recognises the person on the message
header and even then, who can be certain that anyone is who they
say they are any more?
There’s an unsolved mystery here but one that clearly
illustrates how easy it is to get lured into an internet fraud,
with the simple sentence, “The total amount that has been charged
to your credit card is GBP15. If any of the details shown are
incorrect please call customer services on...” How do we tell any
more what’s true and what’s not. I obviously can’t. Can you?
Setting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of leading industry analyst Dr Simon Moores of
Zentelligence.
Acting globally, Zentelligence (Research) advises
governments, suppliers, business and the media on the evolution,
application and delivery of leading-edge technologies, and
specialises in the areas of e-government and information
security.
For further information on Zentelligence and its research,
presentation and analyst services, visitwww.zentelligence.com