Phishing schemes
Phishing is an act of illegally procuring or trying to procure confidential financial information pertaining to Bank account (password) and/or Credit Card related detail of an individual or group of individuals. Phishing is usually done by creating look-alike web sites of Banks and Card issuing companies, where unsuspecting people are requested to enter or share their confidential data, through spam email requests. Historically, the origin of phishing dates back to the year 1995-1996.
The earliest schemes of fishing were executed through bulk mailers sent to general public. However, with the passage of time, phishing techniques or schemes have become more sophisticated and almost impossible to interpret. Modern day phishing schemes target social networking sites to a great extent as people usually share their confidential information in such networks and these details are subsequently used for identity theft related crimes.
Commonly used phishing schemes are through use of manipulated links, forged web addresses and Voice over Internet based phishing. Let us briefly discuss each of these schemes.
Forged Web Links were the oldest phishing schemes. This method used a link directed to a false proxy server or webpage with the intention of capturing the user’s information discreetly. This form of phishing used the electronic footprint technology. Hackers could easily interpret confidential information pertaining to off-guard people, once these manipulative links were clicked upon or were responded to.
A more recent phishing scheme was by way of creating a forged website or email address. Under this technique, a very closely resembled dummy website of the bank or credit card issuing company was created by the scamsters. Customers of such banks were sent out mailers requesting for information around their PIN numbers (which is basically the Identification Codes). Usually these mailers would give a detailed background as to why such information was requested with a view to convince the users. More often than not, these websites were created with meticulous attention to detail and were even beyond the suspicion of very finicky customers.
Phishing schemes are not necessarily restricted to Internet. With the advent of Voice over Internet (or VOIP), telephone phishing have also become widely prevalent. Automated telephone messages (fake) claiming to be from the Bank is sent to the customers of Bank requesting them to update their PIN and/or Internet Banking passwords. As soon as the customer would have responded to such requests, this information would be transmitted electronically to the phishing networks and manipulated thereafter.
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