News and Views

10 responses so far ↓

• 1 Richard // Aug 25, 2008 at 6:35 am

  Very interesting reading and a very sneaky approach. I wonder if I would have been tricked. I’d like to think not, but that was a very professional and good looking job.

• 2 Donna // Aug 25, 2008 at 7:30 pm

  Looks like it wouldn’t fool Firefox users, since it fakes an IE screen. But I’m sure I would have been snowed if that wasn’t my saving factor.

• 3 Don // Aug 25, 2008 at 9:03 pm

  I’m pretty sure the fact it didn’t have a penguin anywhere would have clued me in. 😉

• 4 Heather // Aug 26, 2008 at 7:59 am

  I was duped when I had earthlink into resubmitting my information for billing. I figured it out in 10 min and had my card canceled quickly. It is still very scary stuff.

  The thing that tipped me off with earthlink was that earthlink was misspelled on the website it sent me too.

  I noticed on this article that the word crashes was also misspelled in one of the first warnings.

  Crazy!

• 5 Daryl // Aug 26, 2008 at 11:02 am

  The web server can tell which operating system and web browser you are using, so it’s possible that the web pages could have been customized to look like Firefox or even Linux.

  Though seriously I doubt they bothered with Linux, since the usage is relatively low, and Linux users tend to be more computer savvy (on average, present company excepted). It would be a lot of work for very little extra results.

• 6 Donna // Aug 26, 2008 at 2:00 pm

  Firefox usually recognizes scam sites, but of course it has to be trained. The scammers could probably catch a lot of folks before it got added the list.

• 7 Don // Aug 26, 2008 at 5:52 pm

  Present company excepted???????????

• 8 Daryl // Aug 26, 2008 at 9:44 pm

  Calm down! What I meant was that the windows users reading this blog weren’t necessarily less savvy.

• 9 Don // Aug 27, 2008 at 8:57 am

  Whew!

• 10 Don // Aug 27, 2008 at 8:58 am

  By the way, good save. 😉