Faronics fraud

I received an e-mail this morning that purported to be from Paypal:

Because of the recent Internet fraud activity and the recent innovations in our anti-fraud Department we are planning to introduce a new checking and money transfer coming from the PayPal system confirmation. You`ll get a notification about every PayPal transaction on to your mobile phone.

For this we strongly reccomend you to click the link bellow and update your personal info by entering the paypal site and entering your cell phone number.

Now, I've received these sorts of messages before and was able to immediately recognize it as fraudlent. The mispellings of "reccomend", "bellow" and a few gramatical problems helped. The way to know for sure is to point (but not click) on the link and see that the website it would take you to is msg-paypal.com instead of www.paypal.com.

So, I went to Network Solutions and did a WHOIS on the address msg-paypal.com and learned that it was registered by one Brent Smithurst of British Columbia two days ago. An internet search found out that Brent is Vice President of Technical Operations of Faronics Corporation in Coquitlam, BC.

So what Brent is doing is prending to be Paypal so he can mine the Internet for Paypal account passwords and cell phone numbers.

So, just for laughs, I went to the site and signed into the fraudlent Paypal site using Brent's e-mail address bsmithurst@faronics.com and the password "fraudster". It looked just like a Paypal site and even the code was lifted straight from Paypal's site, but since it allowed me to sign in with Brent's e-mail address and a made up password, it is not Paypal's site. (Unless Brent happened to have the password "fraudster".)

The site asked for credit card information, including the number on the back to "prove" that you actually have the card in your hands. It asked for a cell phone number. It asked for social security number. I filled in some information on behalf of Brent and submitted it whereupon it redirected me to an actual Paypal login site where I was told the login information I had entered was incorrect.

The irony of all this is that Faronics produces products to protect computers from unauthorized executables. I can't help but think that their products protect you from competators executables but allow the worms and viruses produced by the back offices at Faronics right on in.

I have, of course, forwarded all this information to Paypal. I hope that monday morning, Brent will be receiving a call from Paypal's lawyers or, better yet, from the Canadian authorities.