Exposing CyberCrime



Latest Cybercrime.....
The early January report about a Salt Lake man who sold non-existant tickets on EBay to the Fiesta Bowl. He scammed many people and when they went to pick up their tickets he never showed up. You probably read about it, it made nationwide headline news! Well, the FBI has found him and he is going to jail! Our advice....Be careful who you send thousands of dollars to.

A Warning To You.....
Many people have lodging websites, and guess what? Some have websites but don't have actual lodging, really. There have been reports of people planning a trip, paying the money and traveling to a destination only to find that the lodging property they rented did not exist! They got your money and now you need to find a place to stay. This type of scam is another form of "cyber-crime", but doesn't happen on Internet travel directories such as ours. Why?, they have to be real to be listed on our website. A scammer will not use a service like ours because they don't want to be known by anyone. Besides, when someone asks to be included on our pages, we visit with every lodging owner and personally check out their units!

Attention Visitors: Beware of sharks when surfing the Net.....
You can do almost anything on the Internet these days -- from paying your gas bill to buying a flat-screen TV. But that doesn't mean it's safe.

* Easy to get burned: If you're not careful, it's easy to order something online and pay for the item but never receive it. That's what happened to Lesly Curtis, a mental-health-care worker in New York City.
A year and a half ago, Curtis was looking for an obscure book that she thought might help one of her patients. "It wasn't the kind of thing you could just find in any bookstore," said Curtis. But Curtis thought she might find the book online because she had had success shopping on the Web in the past. Indeed, one of the psychology sites she checked had the book for sale. She ordered it on the spot using her Visa card.
Unfortunately, despite numerous e-mails and calls to customer service, Curtis never received the book. "Everybody blamed the problem on someone else," she explained. "Eventually, I just gave up on the money as lost."
When shopping online goes smoothly, it's quick and convenient -- and you can often get a great bargain. But as Curtis found out, no matter how routine the online shopping experience becomes, sending money over the Web is not without risk.
About a third of consumers who have shopped online report difficulties, according to a 2001 study by the National Consumers League. One of the most common problems: not receiving merchandise a person already paid for. Other complaints include being billed for unordered merchandise or being hit with undisclosed charges.

* Safeguards: Good Housekeeping recommends protecting yourself by following these four rules:

1. Try to stick to reliable merchants. Most complaints come from shoppers who buy from small or obscure Web retailers that don't have the resources to make good on lost or stolen merchandise. Go with well-known companies with solid customer service.

2. Scrutinize unfamiliar sites. If you're buying a hard-to-find object that's available only from a relatively unknown merchant, make sure you're dealing with a secure site. When providing financial information, check that the Web site's URL when entering your credit card information starts with "https" or "shttp" rather than with "http," advises Jean Ann Fox at the Consumer Federation of America. The https informs you that it is a secure page.

3. Pay the right way. Assuming that a Web site is secure, your credit card is the safest way to pay because cardholders cannot be held liable for more than $50 in unauthorized charges.

4. Watch out for scams. Crooks sometimes establish a site with an intentionally misspelled address, hoping to trap consumers who make common typing errors when they enter the site.

E Mails From Your Bank, Credit Card Companies, Etc.
They are not real. A surge in emails from banks and other financial concerns have been appearing daily. They look real at first, but they are not. Just this week alone we have seen them come in from US Bank, Fleet Bank, PayPal and a few others. These "Fraud Artists" create emails and pages that look like the legitimate website of your online banking services and ask you to update or verify your information. DON'T DO IT! It's another scam to get your credit card or account information. Legitimate companies Never Ask For This Information, especially through emails.

Utah Leads the Nation in Scam and Fraud Complaint Rates.
The statistics are startling: About 35,000 bogus checks are presented to state banks and credit unions every month, and about half of those are deposited by Utahns who then fall victim to some sort of scam.

The average loss for Utahns who fall victim to sweepstakes, inheritance, employment, Internet sales or dating or any number of other scams is about $6,000, according to a task force of banks and credit unions. Multiplied by the number of Utahns falling victim, that means millions of dollars a month and even billions in a year are flowing into illegitimate pockets.

"It's a phenomenal problem," said Karen Nelson of Wells Fargo Bank, a member of a task force alarmed by the tide of scams rolling over the state and the number of residents falling victim.

In fact, Utah ranks No. 1 among states in reporting consumer-fraud complaints to the Federal Trade Commission.

Lynda Worden of Ogden met a man on an LDS dating site on the Internet. "Apparently he was supposed to be LDS and all this," she said.

The man said he was in the textile business and asked her to take over his business while he was in Spain on a buying trip. He sent a check for $43,000, and Worden started an account using some of her own money and began sending out checks as the man directed. Soon, however, she found out he was part of a Nigerian fraud operation and it was her money, not his, going to nonexistent clients. For Worden, the bottom line was $6,200 lost. "You sure learn things the hard way with the heart," said Worden.

Fueling this surge is the sophisticated forgery of checks of all kinds.

At a news conference Wednesday by the Financial Fraud Task Force, composed of 17 banks and credit unions, Jo Gove of Mountain American Credit Union displayed hundreds of checks, all bogus. Many are sophisticated knockoffs of cashier's checks, American Express and Visa travelers checks, MoneyGrams and postal orders. Those were just the ones her credit union has received in the past few months. Many are so good they can't be distinguished from the real thing. "There is no such thing as a safe check anymore," she said.

Kelly Winfield of Ogden received a notice in the mail that she had won a lottery. She had played games and entered contests on the Internet, so she thought she finally had gotten lucky. In the notification was a large check that she was told to deposit and then send the lottery money to cover expenses such as attorneys' fees. By the time she learned the check was no good and she hadn't won anything, Winfield was out $3,000. "It's stressful thinking about how I'm going to pay it back and looking for a second job," Winfield said.

The fraud artists take advantage not just of people's gullibility but the weeks or months between the time a check is deposited and when it comes back as a forgery. Typically, a check will be sent to a Utahn who then deposits it in a personal account. The participant is asked to send back some money for fees of some type, a deposit or any number of other reasons. The victim sends back money from their account, only to learn that the original check was no good and he or she is out the money sent back. "Checks can take anywhere from a week to three to six months to clear," said Jeanine Bader of Deseret First Credit Union. "I've even seen up to a year for the items to clear and come back." The scammers have, she said, "gotten smarter than the system, unfortunately."

"Sometimes you think good things happen to good people," said Joyce Zumwalt of Erda. She had been out of a job for about a year when a check for about $2,800 arrived in the mail from AAA, a reward for her 35 years of membership and a refund on insurance premiums. Everything looked right: the logo on the letter, the insignia on the check, the return address and the telephone numbers she called to verify the refund. "I had been in the financial sector for 25 years as an accounts-received manager," Zumwalt said. "I thought I knew what I was doing." Zumwalt deposited the check. She considers herself lucky that she had been unable to get hold of someone for further instructions, which likely would have meant being asked to send some of the money back. The check came back bogus. By that time, she had bounced a number of checks, and had to make up the overdrafts and fees. Now she worries that her credit rating has been trashed. "It turned into a nightmare," she said.

"If you bank, if you have a checking account, if you work on the Internet, if you are a senior citizen, you are a target," said Kevin Olsen, director of the Division of Consumer Protection. He warned that most of the money goes out of the country, often through untraceable wire transfers. "There's not a whole bunch we can do to get the money back," said Olsen. Postal Inspector Bob Maes displayed a basket full of mail that an elderly woman had received in the past year for sweepstakes, investments, lotteries and other pitches. The unnamed woman had lost $100,000 to scams coming in the mail and over the telephone, he said. "We see people of every economic level who are falling victims to this," Maes said.