A well-known but often unreported trend among scammers is that they buy domain names which closely resemble those of established and popular companies.
By purchasing the domains for popular companies ranging from popular retailers to financial institutions and even government sites, hackers can set up sites that look legitimate or which load accidental browsers' computers with malicious programs, according to a report from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, television station
WPVI. Often, this "typosquatting" is done by buying a domain with two letters from a popular website transposed - vsia.com instead ofvisa.com, for instance.
"When you log into what looks like a legitimate merchant site - but it's not and you enter in your user name, your password, or any sort of payment information," Rob D'Ovidio of Drexel University told the news station.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the ways consumers can be affected by a scam website, and what they can do to prevent these incidents from happening.
© 2003-2012 IDentity Theft 911, LLC. All Rights Reserved