Verizon Sets Alarm against New Phishing E-Mails

Verizon Wireless is warning its customers to be wary of a bunch of fraudulent e-mails purporting to be its customer service notices, making rounds across the Internet.

These fraudulent e-mails called phishing e-mails lure unwitting Internet users to enter personal information on unauthorized Web sites to enable the phishers collect and abuse them for monetary gains.

The phishing scams trick users in to providing their personal info like social security numbers, drivers license numbers and the like on a fake website, which send all that details to online identity thieves. "Phishing" means to use the "phone to fish for information."

Jim Matteo, Verizon Security team leader for cyber security said in a company press release that Media Newswire published on February 16, 2007 that Verizon never sends such e-mail messages asking for personal information. He said the scam type is quite old but lately there has been more of it using more sophisticated illegitimate web pages that consumers think to be real.

The security experts at Verizon took immediate action to fight the bogus Web sites as soon as it found the problem. Apart from this the company tries to spread awareness about ways to avoid becoming victims to such scams, for the benefit of consumers.

Verizon through its own fraud detection team was constantly watchful for illegitimate Web sites and phishing scams, said Matteo in his company press release.

These types of scams are so overwhelming that Verizon has set up a website to deal with them. From its page, http://www.verizon.com/alert, customers can report a fraud or scam by opening the "Contact Us" link and subsequently "Send us an e-mail" from the next page. Verizon security team uses this process to collect all reports of frauds and scams.

Matteo further explained other ways that a consumer can apply to verify the legitimacy of e-mail. First e-mail with misspellings is a bogus e-mail. Secondly, if a website via an e-mail link asks for personal info such as bank account number of mother's maiden name, it is probably a fraudulent e-mail. Verizon does not ever require such types of information, Matteo said.

Related article: Virginia - Top Spammer Challenges the anti-spam Law

» SPAMfighter News - 2/27/2007