New Breed Of Cybersquatters Stealing Info
from the and-so-it-goes dept
It seems that every day we hear about more sophistacated frauds online. The latest trend is for cybersquatters to register names that are very close to well-known sites, and then use them to set up a replica site which will capture your user information, and sometimes your credit card. This was the strategy employed by a company last year who set up a PayPal fraud site where they replaced the lowercase letter "L" at the end of PayPal with the number one - which is almost indistinguishable in many fonts. While sometimes people go to these fraud sites after mistyping where they want to go, the creators of the sites often use an even sneakier method to fool users. They do what they can to get themselves listed on search engines - so people feel that the sites must be legit.
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"Cybersquatters" going the way of "Hacker"
Same game is being played here. The con-artists are setting up a look-alike site in order to associate themselves with the real site.
I'd love to see the media occasionally check the technical encyclopedia to make sure they are using the right word...otherwise a Cybersquatter is going to end up standing for the same thing a "Hacker" currently stands for (thanks to the media,) "a criminal who uses computers."
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