PUTNAM?COUNTY — Cell phone users who had Verizon as their carrier have recently been contacted letting them know they have won $51, which would be taken off their phone bills. The calls instruct the callers to go to www.verizon51.com, where they would be asked for their cell phone number, password and Social Security number.
Debbie Smith, of Cookeville, was one person who received the call Monday morning. She said she has her doctor’s telephone number saved in her phone and the call looked like it was coming from the doctor.
The call directed her to the verizon51.com website, which she said “looks identical to Verizon.”
Smith said her husband received a call Sunday with the same type of message, but his caller ID said it was a private number.
She said they did go to the website and entered the cell phone number and passcode, but stopped before entering their Social Security number.
“It was a real red flag when they were asking for that,” Smith said.
According to Smith, she and her husband reset the password after they looked into the matter.
When a member of the Herald-Citizen staff attempted to access the verizon51.com website on Monday, a message appeared saying it was a reported web forgery and included the following message: “Web forgeries are designed to trick you into revealing personal or financial information by imitating sources you can trust.”
A representative from Verizon confirmed this was a phishing scheme.
Although customers of Verizon were the target of this particular scheme, the popular phone company is far from the only company that has to deal with loyal customers being scammed by a fraudulent, look-alike website with which they are not affiliated. In fact, these schemes are so popular that the this may very well not be the most recent phishing scheme when this article is printed.
According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, phishing scams can use either social engineering or technical subterfuge. The scam targeting Verizon cell phone customers would probably be considered a social engineering scheme.
The APWG defines a social engineering scheme as one that “ use spoofed e-mails purporting to be from legitimate businesses and agencies, designed to lead consumers to counterfeit websites that trick recipients into divulging financial data such as usernames and passwords.”
On the other hand, a technical subterfuge scheme is one that will “plant crimeware on PCs to steal credentials directly,” according to the APWG.
The APWG said in their last quarterly report that 2013 was one of the most active years on record for phishing and 840 unique institutions were targeting by phishing schemes second half of last year alone.
Some companies are targeted by phishing schemes many times, while others are only targeted a time or two, according the APWG. They also reported that there were more than 111,000 reports of phishing in October, November or December of last year, while there were more than 143,000 in July, August and September.
The majority of phishing sites in October, November and December were hosted in the United States, according to the report.
Not only was the United States at the top of the list of 10 countries with the most phishing websites reported, the United States accounts for more than double the other nine countries combined, according to the report.
The report states that retail and services, such as Verizon, accounted for less than eight percent of all phishing schemes in October, November and December of 2013, while more than three-quarters of the attacks were payment services (53.95 percent) and financial institutions (24.26 percent).