Phishing Scam at Digital Point
A couple of days back I received the following PM over on the Digital Point forums.
I get a fair amount of spam over there so I followed the link so that I could report the post. However on following the link it looked like I’d been logged out and would need to resubmit my password to log in again.
This seemed odd but forums do odd things from time to time. However checking the address bar you could see exactly what they were trying to do.
The link had taken me off to a different site where they were trying to get me to enter my DP username and password which if they had they could then take over my account and totally bugger any reputation I have there or use an account with a decent iTrader count to rip somebody off. I PMed it to Crazy Rob and he quickly banned the account that sent the original PM.
I used to receive phishing emails like this all the time in regards to online banking but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one on a webmaster forum so it’s certainly something to be vigilant of, it was very well done and to be honest I only just noticed.
On another criminal note I had an exceedingly surreal experience yesterday, I took my daughter to see the new St Trinians movie (never again) and afterwards we stopped at our local super market to buy dinner. Whilst we’re being served our cashier gets held up by a guy in a balaclava and “something” hidden in his pocket, who ends up jumping over the counter to rob the till and runs out with a fistful of notes. Nobody got hurt but all involved were a bit shocked, even the robber as when he asked the shop assistant to open the till she said she’d have to get her supervisor, surreal.
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I got almost exactly the same thing this morning…
Mine said
“http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=636714 (http://digitalpoint.freeweb7.com/digitalpoint/index.html)
Ok, so I feel generous I don’t know why, but I will make something realistic that I can pay.
I will pay you $50 if you can guess the number that I already picked.
The Number is between the range of -1000 to 1000.
Contest limited to 500 people, I will check back in a week to see if anyone got it.
Good Luck”
Mine came from a different username to yours, it was from ‘geme’
I was going to forward the PM on to a moderator…but they are kind of hard to find over there, huh?
It’s always worth reporting things like that, what I did was go to View Forum Leaders (List of admins and moderators) and then just PM the first that I saw as currently online.
Yes, I thought of that after I left my first comment, but the user had already been banned..
Thanks for posting that. I use DP daily and also received several spams but never a phishing attempt. And even if I would it’s pretty hard to notice the url. From the login screenshot looks very authentic. I see now the page was taken down from freeweb7 so can’t check it.
I registered on DP only a couple of weeks ago, and I got exactly the same spam PM.
Didn’t realise it was a dodgy link though cos I didn’t click on it, and just deleted the PM.
Good catch though
It goes to show that crooks will go where the people are. I’ve been scammed on DP as well, I’m very cautious now. Sorry to hear about the hold-up, glad you’re safe though
I got that too, I bet some people fell for it. They should have gone through and deleted all his PM’s from the database after you reported it maybe.
So the premise is, they get your username and password for DP and try and sell things on the site as you?
As your a trusted member, then they may find it easier to scam other members?
Yeah I think that’s about the crux of it, you do seem to get a lot of scammers on DP at the moment.
So now phishers came to DP, too. Everyday there are more and more that kind of scamers on the net.
Wow, that is scary stuff. I have seen some shady links from threads on DP but didn’t know that an actual thread on DP could knock people off like that.
You’d hope that being a tecg/webmaster based site not many if any users would fall for that
That’s got me wondering to be honest.
Has anyone used it?
Personally I copy and paste the address rather than use the link. Slightly longer but safer.
Also I’ve seen several likes of the idea for myspace but for some reason FF detects it and warns me
Jeez…gotta love this world! Maybe if they spent a little time doing research, these people can find LEGIT ways to make money on the internet.
Sadly these are becoming all too common. I tried to pay for an article service a couple months ago and the “Pay Me” link resulted in a PayPal phishing site.
I guess we’ve got to accept it as a chance to become more cautious, as if we needed to become more so!
There are many such stories on DP, this is why so many scams now on domains forum when reputed members with high ITrader scam many people last week, probably their accounts was hacked