4()S -/.4( The WatchDog goes after...
Gone Fishing
Information thieves are trying yet another tack to
steal your online financial information: pop-ups.
Until now, what’s been popular are “fisher” or
“fishing” frauds, whereby unwitting consumers
receive spam e-mail inviting them to visit fake web
sites made to look like eBay, Paypal, or a bank. But
that method has pitfalls because it’s possible for
people to see the site they’re actually at by looking
at the address bar. Especially now that Internet
Explorer has been patched to prevent address-bar
spoofing. So frauders have turned to pop-ups, which
can be made to appear over legitimate web sites
as a way of fooling you. The Dog recently received
a spam inviting him to visit Citibank.com. Click the
link, and you’ll indeed land on Citibank’s perfectly
legitimate web site. The fraud occurs in the form of
a pop-up that appears to be related to the site, and
that asks you for “e-mail verification” including
debit card number and your ATM PIN. Scary, but
prevention is simple. Never click a link to visit a
financial institution. Instead, open a new browser
window and type in the URL yourself. If you’re ultra
paranoid, you may want to close all of your other
browser windows first.
As a side note, ZoneLab’s ZoneAlarm can now
verify if you are indeed at eBay by comparing the IP
address of eBay with what’s in your browser. It’s a
good start. Eventually, we’d like to see ZoneAlarm
and other apps ensure that we’re actually at every
site we think we’re visiting.Porn Pirates
DEAR DOG: About a year ago, I got a bill that
claimed to be seriously past due, so I lookedinto it. The sender, Alyon Technologies (P.O.
Box 923299, Norcross, GA 30010-3299,
800.269.6356), is a billing company for online
porn sites, some of which may use redial-
ers to redirect your modem through long
distance phone lines in Europe. I sent copiesof my phone bills showing that the number
I was billed for did not match any that I had
called. I’ve had the number since 2000. I never
received a response. June rolls around and I get
a collection notice from International Recovery
Service in Palm Desert, Calif., so I send them
the same information I sent to Alyon (copies of
phone bills and the invoice to show they had
the wrong number), and they responded with
a letter saying they were not going to try to col-
lect on an obviously bad billing. Now
it’s a year later, and I get another
collection notice from Merchants
Credit Guide Co. of Chicago, also
regarding Alyon Technologies.
How can I shut these
pirates down once and for all,
and can I start billing Alyon
for all the time and money I’m spending
responding to the bad billing?
— ERIK HILSINGERTHE DOG RESPONDS: While you’d think Alyon was
some fly-by-night operation with a greasy-haired,pinky-ringed guy answering the phone, the company
is legit. As you said, Alyon offers services for porn
sites that want to bill customers by letting them down-
load dialers. The dialers call overseas phone numbers
and the cost of accessing the content is added to
the consumers’ phone bill for $4.99 a minute. Sounds
good. Now enter the Federal Trade Commission and
a convoluted trip through the court system that had a
federal judge siding with the dialers.
Last July the FTC filed a complaint against Alyon
alleging the company engaged in unfair and decep-
tive trade practices. The FTC complaint says that
because of errors in Alyon’s database, the company
billed many consumers who never downloaded
the dialers. The FTC says it received 1,200 online
complaints about Alyon from consumers. The FTC
has used similar tactics to slam other dialers to the
ground, but in Alyon’s case, the FTC’s request for
an injunction was denied. Federal Judge Richard
W. Story ruled that Alyon could continue to operate
as long as it followed standards set by an earlier
settlement with the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s
office. That settlement requires Alyon to tell consum-
ers how to remove the dialers; stop distributing theMAXIMUMPC APRIL 2004
7atCh$oG
Say hello to Puppy,
WatchDog of the Month.Maximum PC takes a bite out of bad gear
Internet Fraud >Alyon >CPU Markers >Kyocera >Apple
The web page is real, but the pop-up asking for your credit card number is a scam.THE FTC SAYS IT RECEIVED 1,
ONLINE COMPLAINTS ABOUT ALYON
FROM CONSUMERS.”
“