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American Red Cross Brand Victimizing Innocent People

According to the news reported by GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY on April 24, 2008, the Office of Investigations, Compliance and Ethics is informed about an e-mail that claimed Red Cross and the Romanian Government are appealing for donations to help the people in Tecuci of Romania.

As per the news, the fraud e-mail requests people, who wish to donate more than $100, to send money to a Romanian bank account through wire transfer, or for below $100, use PayPal account with address redcross@representative.com.

On the other side, the American Red Cross warned its members that it has not advertised for transferring money to the Romanian Bank account. It also clarified that the communication seems to be a scam in which its name has been used. The organization has also called the Internet Crime Complaint Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for investigation.

The Office of Investigation, Compliance and Ethics requested people not to divulge their personal information on asking by suspicious and unsolicited e-mails to protect themselves of being duped.

The Department of justice, FBI, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agreed to call phishing as an identity theft scam which is being increasingly used by attackers. phishing e-mails ask for confidential information of people and seem as if they have come from a genuine source. The links given in the mail connect the recipient to an authentic looking page where he is asked to disclose personal information including home addresses, sensitive financial information, credit card number and many other details.

As per the reports, phishing e-mails usually arrive from reputed and legitimate Websites. PayPal, BestBuy, eBay, American Online, MSN and Yahoo! are some of the sites commonly used by phishers to execute their plans.

However, earlier too similar attempts have been made by phishers to extract money from people on pretext of donation. In previous instances, the Hurricane Katrina was used by phishers to link with The American Red Cross to attract people to malicious Websites for donating money to help tragedy struck people. Similarly, phishers used the Asian tsunami tragedy to dupe people and many donors were defrauded too.

Related article: American College of Physicians’ Website Hacked by North Carolina Businessman

» SPAMfighter News - 4/30/2008

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