Free ads site could help fraudsters recruit middlemen
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Saddling up money mules Popular UK-based free ads website Adzooks is inadvertently helping fraudsters by failing to properly screen job offers for obvious cons, anti-fraud activists have warned.â¦
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Scammers and thieves are out there, but you can protect yourself.
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FakeYourSpace.com offers users of MySpace.com a way to enhance their pages by hiring âfriendsâ for money.
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The scamsters, who target get-rich-quick stock shoppers, have a new attention-getter in their pitch repertoire: high-quality video. (The quality of the pitches, alas, remains  the same.)
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Meg Whitman describes how eBay, Paypal are combating phony e-mails and Web sites that may ensnare unsuspecting users--and drive away customers.
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Auction company is apparently drawn to the classifieds model pioneered by community resource site.
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Industry group will offer a free program to help users find and eliminate illegal files.
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(InfoWorld) - Spammers have found a way to mine free Web-hosting services for cash. Online scammers have long used free hosting services such as Yahoo Geocities or Tripod as a way to get around e-mail filters that might otherwise recognize their spammy Web sites. But now some enterprising spammers have begun selling each other these free Web pages, according to security vendor McAfee Inc. For US$25 per week a spammer will sell 50 Web-hosting accounts that can be used to redirect Web traffic to sites that normally would be flagged. "These 'link providers' create and maintain thousands of free hosting accounts on behalf of the spammers," wrote McAfee's Nick Kelly in a recent posting to McAfee's Avert Labs blog. That posting can be foundÂ here. "They know that the bigger hosts are unlikely to get blacklisted because they have so many legitimate users," he added. Scammers also use the free Web pages to try to manipulate search engines, by making it look as if their Web sites are widely linked, said Adam O'Donnell, senior research scientist with Cloudmark Inc., an e-mail filtering company. And while the free hosting providers are taking steps to shut down this abuse, they appear to be fighting a losing battle. In late June, Cloudmark researchers were seeing about 1,500 phony URLs (uniform resource locators) on any given day on one of the most abused free hosting services (O'Donnell declined to name names). One month later, that number had jumped to 3,500. Spammers are simply able to out-pace the hosters' security teams, O'Donnell said. "They will gain more hosts for their pages than the company is able to take down," he said. The free hosters have been placed in a tough position because they do not want to shut down legitimate users, but they also do not have the technical resources to mine spam for Web pages that are being misused, O'Donnell said. Lately, however, the hosters have been partnering with security vendors to address the problem. Cloudmark is working with some hosting providers, hoping to sell them "reputation" information that tells them how many times their member URLs are being seen in spam. McAfee has been providing similar information to an undisclosed service provider, Kelly wrote. "This relationship has cut the abuse observed by us on that provider by over 90 percent in less than a week." He added, "let's hope those spammers are buying their new watches from pound$hop rather than Bolex this summer."
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Try not to smile: A top spammer may be sentenced to hard time.
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FTC says tracking them down won&#39;t be cheap; rewards of up to $250,000 needed, commission says. WASHINGTON  - Members of Congress have backed a program encouraging &quot;bounty hunters&quot; to track down e-mail spammers.
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New plug-in software for browsers aims to help people avoid becoming victims of online fraud.
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A start-up began offering a technology Wednesday that can spoof a caller ID number, potentially opening the door to telemarketing calls that seem to be coming from a relative or a different company.
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The service allows users to search for specific items to find the best deal and, unlike some similar British sites, it&#39;s free to users and retailers.
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Auction company sets up free, private mail service in attempt to derail scam artists using its good name.
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After a drop off earlier this fall, more fraudulent Web sites are popping up.
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The FBI has a request for all Internet surfers and potential crime solvers: Please go to http://www.bankbandits.org .
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites could help drive spammers out of business.