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Chinese Spammers Use SEO Techniques to Launch Attack

Websense, an Internet monitoring company, has released a warning notice that Chinese scammers are employing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques to corrupt enterprise data.

The company states that the scammers send massive volumes of spam mails containing phony telephone numbers listed against legitimate organizations. This is followed by a second surge of spam mails pertaining to the conventional lottery scams in which users are deceived into paying administration and transfer fees prior to receiving a prize.

According to the company, most of these telephone numbers are of the Hainan province in China, as reported by SCMagazine on September 8, 2008.

Besides, a number of high profile Websites like Tencent, QQ, Taobao Sina and others from shopping to portal sites are used as a part of the attack. The attack uses a large number of bogus telephone numbers to entice consumers into dialing. Thus, the association with the single strike source becomes harder. The scammers post the bogus phone numbers onto some popular Bulletin Board System (BBS) and other message boards as the latter's Websites have high possibilities of return on search engines.

According to Websense, the spam mail entices the recipient into calling a premium customer service number as this generates an extra revenue for the spam criminals. When users try to verify the existence of the companies over the Internet, they find that the phone numbers are apparently real due to the earlier surge of SEO spam.

Moreover, the company stated that prior to sending the contact details requested, the user might want to confirm these claims. And when they carry out a search on well-known search engines, they would find that the bogus telephone numbers are associated with the details of customer care, as reported by MagSecure on September 6, 2008.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to interpret the extent of the comment/blog spam, Baidu and Google are compiling several thousand Websites that contain the fake numbers.

However, Websense said that although the fraud is mainly hitting the Chinese Internet users, it would spread globally, moving from lottery businesses to even more traditional ones.

Related article: Chinese Hackers Threatening Korean Game Sites

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