Spoofing - It's not a joke

[Dr Strangelove]

Last year I bought some games for my kids on Amazon.com because the ones they asked for were not on stock locally. Last week I received an e-mail from "Amazon.com Inc." reporting possible irregularities with my account. The e-mail provided a link to contact them in order to fix the problem. I followed the link to a webpage that did indeed look a lot like an Amazon.com webpage. It had the correct colors, banners, ads and buttons, so I started to fill in the identification forms, but after completing the first page I was sent to a page with blanks for my credit card number, and more ominously my credit card PIN number. I thought about it for a second and decided that Amazon.com simply wouldn't need my PIN number, so I backed out. I decided to google Amazon.com outside of the e-mail link, but found that when I accessed "My Account" I was back on the same pages. I was still suspicious so I just quit. A few days later I revisited Amazon.com and found that the "My Account" page was completely different - it no longer asked for my credit card and PIN numbers. I contacted Amazon.com, reported the incident and sent to them an attachment including the headers of the offending e-mail. Their support person replied that the e-mail did not come from them and that I had been "spoofed".
I still don't understand how the "spoof" managed to redirect my attempt to contact Amazon.com from outside of the link they provided.

[Asher]

Because you don't have an eye for detail, nor a client that detects phishing.

Upgrade your mail client and web browser.

[DinoDoc]

I get those occassionally for ebay. I just foward them onto the Ebay fraud link. I've always been curious what they do to them if anything.

[LordShiva]

Sometimes when I'm bored, I fill out the forms with bogus credit card/bank account numbers, and swear words for my login and passwords.

[pchang]

I think it would really be fun

if I could fill out one of those things with the personal details of a high ranking Russian Mafia member.

[Spiffor]

I too get them occasionally. Anything that doesn't directly link to an official host (ebay.com, amazon.fr etc) gets immediately ignored.

Anything that looks like a legitimate host, I look whether the link actually leads to said host.

And I never even give my credit card numbers when I'm not buying something. If they need my bank number, they'll have it when I'll also need something from them.

[Jon Miller]

One time while late at night I entered in info also. I should have caught it at the same time as you, but was tired. I froze my account and had to deal with it for a while (got a new account/etc).

Currently, if I get an email from anything financially related online, I go and enter in the base web address by hand(Like I would go to www.amazon.com). Then I go and find out from there what info I need to put in.

Jon Miller

[Sirotnikov]

Re: Spoofing - It's not a joke

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove

I still don't understand how the "spoof" managed to redirect my attempt to contact Amazon.com from outside of the link they provided.

If it somehow also contained a script, that written something in the hosts file, or your browser's DNS cache...

[Harovan]

I often see such phishing mails when I look up the spam filter, mostly from Ebay, Amazon and several banks. For me they're especially easy to tell, since neither of them would write me in English (I use the German portals in all cases). In most cases I just ignore them. Sometimes when I'm bored, I fill out their forms, as Santa Claus, George W. Bush, Donald Duck or Timothy Truckle, with phantasy addresses, card numbers and pins.

[Adagio]

Wheren I have the slightest doubt about the email being real or not I always check all links in the mail to see where they direct, usually you can at first sight see that they direct to some place else than where they're supposed to
One time when I got such email from Paypal I went to the site (knowing it was fake), entered some fake login information, and surprise surprise it actually logged me in

Often I get such email talking about my ebay account... but since I don't have one there's nothing to be worried about

[Dinner]

NEVER click on the link provided in these e-mails as they are almost always phishing attempts. If you really feel like you need to check something out then manually go to the webpage (amazon.com etc) as clicking on that link could literally take you anywhere.

[Dr Strangelove]

Well, as I said in my post when I got suspicious I closed the link then Goggle searched "Amazon.com". I then clicked on the link for Amazon.com listed on the search results page. So somehow it also managed to redirect a completely seperate link? I wonder if it would have made a difference if I had hand entered the URL for Amazon.com? Oh well, if it happens again I'll see if that makes a difference.

A couple months ago I received a similar e-mail purporting to be from my bank, but it was so obviously a fake I didn't bother to click on the link.

[Mercator]

Are you sure the credit card/PIN page was also there, or did you just see that the first page matched?

[Ming]

I love when you get that kind of crap from banks you don't even have accounts with... but obviously, somebody must be stupid enough to offer up their account and pin number, or they still wouldn't be doing it

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ming
I love when you get that kind of crap from banks you don't even have accounts with... but obviously, somebody must be stupid enough to offer up their account and pin number, or they still wouldn't be doing it

I followed the link to a webpage that did indeed look a lot like an Amazon.com webpage. It had the correct colors, banners, ads and buttons, so I started to fill in the identification forms