Oh, no, another Internet scam (Feb 24)
By Charles Doud
The Madera Tribune
As if banks and their customers didn’t have enough to worry about, hackers have been figuring out new ways to raid the bank accounts of those who bank online.
USA Today tells of “trojans” which, like viruses, sneak onto one’s computer hard drive and wait until one opens one’s bank account online. Once the bank account is open on the customer’s computer, the trojan leaps aboard and either steals information to allow the theft of money later, or begins transferring money to other accounts on the spot.
“Banking trojans can be gotten by clicking on a viral link to a greeting card or a video that arrives in e-mail spam,” USA Today says. “Or, they can be picked up by clicking to a Web page that’s been corrupted by hackers.”
F-Secure counted 59,111 unique banking trojans on the Internet in 2008, the newspaper reports.
No bank is safe, not even PayPal, the online cash-exchange service which supposedly enables online shopping with relative security. At least one Madera family was robbed online recently during an Internet transaction on PayPal, and the culprit would appear to have been a trojan or a derivative.
The lesson in all this is to avoid Internet grunge. Never open an online greeting card, even if you know the sender. The sender could inadvertently be sending you a trojan or virus that resides on his or her computer without his or her knowledge. Don’t open free videos. Many are launched for the purpose of carrying trojans. Don’t open e-mails from people you don’t know. Never open an attachment on any e-mail sent by someone you don’t know.
Restrict Internet commerce only to companies you know, where you can use your credit card, along with its built-in refund protection in case you are scammed. PayPal apparently provides no such protection, nor do other payment-intermediary services. And they are as scammable as any bank.
