New Credit Card Scam
 

Got this message in my work email this morning:

email transcript follows:----------------
Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
(ZVC247@aol.com) on Friday, October 1, 2004 at 19:43:55
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

: Hello, my name is Ebony Warner, on behalf of the AOL Security Department, we regret to inform that our last attempt to charge your current amount due was declined by your credit card company.
We believe this is due to minor problems within our database.
We request that you enter updated information, go to http://www.update.b3.nu to continue your membership with America Online.
Please use a credit card that is currently in use for any AOL services to ensure the highest level of quality service and do reduce conflict.

Regards,
AOL Credit staff member 22932
Ebony T. Warner
http://www.update.b3.nu
email transcript ends----------------------

This is real interesting since I don't have ANY association with AOL! This message was forwarded to AOL security...

The website represents itself as AOL and requests creditcard and paypal account information.

BEWARE of what information you submit to websites you visit as a result of unsolicited email.

John,
I got a similar one regarding the credit card used to pay my Earthlink account. It had the Earthlink logo and looked official. It was sent to one of my subsidiary Email addresses and not the primary. I clicked on the link I was supposed to go to to update my info but it was no longer valid. I passed it on the the Earthlink fraud department.

That URL ending in NU is Niue, an island to the east of Australia in the same general area as Fiji and Tonga. In the early 1900's it was an annex of New Zeland. Too far away to go put a knot on someone's head big enough to hitch a horse to.

If you go to money.excite and get a recent write up of posts for the stock Earthlink you will see that there has been and explosion of spywear on the internet in the past year. Earthlink seems to be a leader in supplying free softwear to detect this sort of criminal activity. But detection software can be purchased at a number of locations for people who don't use Earthlink.
Big Norm

Don't even purchase detection software. Ad-Aware and Spybot are free and are dedicated to updating the software to keep up with the newest ideas in spyware. I can't even count the number of people I've suprised at how much faster their computer would be running after using Ad-Aware to clean it out!!! ITS FREE!!!

E-Mail me and I'll send it to you...

Johnny is right, I use these two freeware for personal use softwares and have also run them for people and they are amazed at how much better their computers run and those darn pop-ups go away!

Ed

Ed:

Here is link for Adaware download from Lavasoft that folks might use.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/

David