Parking Ticket, Phishing, Trojan Viruses , Spyware

You walk out of the store into the busy parking lot and on your windshield sits a little yellow jewel. A parking ticket! Money is not tight enough, now you have to deal with this stinking ticket.

When you get home, you look at it, and there is a website to take care of it. Being the budding geek that you are, you go online to take care of it. After all, you pay your bills, get airline tickets, and do your banking online. Paying a ticket will be a cinch.

However, you could be directed to a site that installs malware or viruses on your computer or worse yet, trick you into giving them your personal information.

In Grand Forks North Dakota, people received parking tickets, and when they went to the website, they got to a site that looked pretty real; it even had photos of cars parked badly. Once they got there, the site attempted to download Malware onto their computer.

This is touted as the first recorded instance of this kind of scam. It is a real world phishing scam, where they contact you in the real world, then get you to go to a website, which in turn, is trying to install crud on your computer. Normally, this type of scam has been limited to email or websites.

This particular scam was mainly trying to load malware on to the unsuspecting users computer. It is quite easy to take this one step further with not much work. The scammers could have the user put in their credit card info, social security, drivers’ license number, and who knows what. Poof! Identity info stolen.

So far this particular scam was very limited to that community, but it is something to be aware of.

Remember, whenever going to websites, look at the name before you type them in. If you are not sure, go to the site directly. For instance, if you got a ticket in Lebanon or Albany that was suspicious like this, go to the city website first, and see if it is real. If you are still not sure call them.

Under no circumstance, do you want to go to the site from the link on the fake ticket. You also do not want to put any important info in any site that you are not sure of. Many of the Internet Security programs including Trend Micro have a phishing filter that helps with this type of bad stuff. But those scammers might even be able to get around your filter.

Remember, common sense rules! If you are not sure, don’t go there and don’t put in personal information unless you are 100% confident of the site.

Since we are in tax season here is another important tip:

Last year the IRS reported record numbers of scams about taxes. People received emails saying they are being audited, or they need to correct their personal info with the IRS and they were bogus.

See Also
spyware removal
Bad Information For Hackers
How Do Spyware Infect A System
Adware - How it Can Protect Your Machine