Bank/credit card scams

A few notes on the recent bank and credit card scams that have been going aroung email.

Hmm… I’ve (like many others) been getting messages from various “banks” and “credit card” services that try to get me to fill a survey because of all of the resent frauds. We’ll, today I finally took a closer look at the URL where the survey is supposed to be. While the URL looks like http://www.mastercard.com/cgi-bin/emergserv.cgi?… even in Thunderbird, the real URL is http://61.197.191.122/%20/www.mastercard.com/certegy_mc/… You can see the real URL by pointing your mouse over the link and looking at the status bar, as usual. Trying to access the page with Firefox results in a connection refused and the address bar shows the real URL. So, without a test with Internet Explorer, I’d presume that the “survey” only works with IE as the URL will only look like a valid Mastercard URL in it. Once again, I am grateful that IE isn’t even available on Linux.