The Online Banking Fraud That Wasn't
from the this-is-weird dept
Anyone have any idea what's happening here? Apparently, someone set up a website that sounded - in every way - like it was a scam to get user's bank account info. There was an email that directed people to a website, asking them to change their PIN. It sent them to a website that was not associated with the bank, but (here's the odd part), that site then just loaded the actual bank website in a full frame on the page. Thus, the page looked exactly like the bank's website because it was the bank's website. The online thing that was noticeably different was the URL was the URL of the "scammer". So, either, this was an incredibly poorly thought out scam, or there's more to it than was explained in this article.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Give it a little thought and you'll figure it out
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Re: Give it a little thought and you'll figure it
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Re: Give it a little thought and you'll figure it
What I suspect this person was doing was researching how susceptable people are to this kind of social engineering. The question is whether they were researching for legitimate reasons or illegitimate reasons - like a subsequent exploit that did capture a PIN.
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Re: Give it a little thought and you'll figure it
A pretty clever tactic, if you ask me. It'd be even better if you could find a way to rewrite the displayed URL in such a way that it looks the same as the official site's URL. This is a much harder prospect; barring security holes, I don't think any browsers will let you do this.
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