Fraudulent E-mails Masquerade Amadeus

Amadeus, an online website delivering necessary travel inputs is warning innocent users about the camouflaging intention of an online phishing scam making rounds in the Internet for duping innocent users as reported by travelagentcentral on August 19, 2011.

According to Amadeus, the problem was significant earlier this month (August 2011) when a small number of travel agents received the phishing email, with an Amadeus logo that seemed to be sent supposedly from an official e-mail address.

The online scam incidence came under vigilance during the first half of August 2011, when some travel agents received a phishing e-mail carrying the logo of Amadeus and bearing an official e-mail address. The subject line of the e-mail read "About Amadeus register user session".

The e-mail begins at a very amicable note requesting users to check their registered user session and asking them if they had been using their services of recent or not.

Amadeus also highlighted that the scam e-mail carried an attachment of a link and travel agents clicking on the link were prompted to enter their username, password, and industry ID and fill a form on a phishing website.

While commenting on the above scam e-mail, one of the officials at Amadeus denied the fact that such an e-mail had not have been send from the company as published in tnooz on August 22, 2011.

Amadeus, further alerted people that such a confidential note is never requested from users through an e-mail, as published by travelagentcentral on August 19, 2011.

However, customers are recommended to adept various necessary preventive measures in order to safeguard themselves from phishing activities. Some of these measures include avoiding oneself from opening suspicious e-mails, not opening the links that are provided in mails from unknown senders. Apart from all these, it is necessary to secure the passwords and avoid using very weak passwords. In order to strengthen passwords, a combination of numbers, letters, and signs must be used and one should modify them on a regular basis for enhanced security. Nonetheless, under any circumstances, if a user feels being victimized of such scrupulous act, they should immediately intimate the local law enforcement agency and also inform the sales or customer service reprehensive at Amadeus.

Furthermore, Internet Identity (IID), a provider of technology and services has been created to combat phishing scams and facilitate organizations with improved security. However, IID in its Second Quarter (Q2-2011) eCrime Trends Report claimed that an aggregate quarter to quarter phishing incidence has increased by 11%.

Related article: Fraudulent Warning to Customers of Halifax

» SPAMfighter News - 9/1/2011