WHAT IS SMISHING?
New technology means new ways to steal. One of the latest is “smishing,” which is nothing more than a phishing fraud sent via SMS text messaging. E-con artists are getting more sophisticated in approaching potential victims. One tactic has been to write spam that purports to come from a trusted source, like Paypal. When Paypal, which is owned by eBay, learned that spammers were using its name, they put a digital signature on their e-mails and asked providers like Yahoo and Google to block any e-mail purporting to come from them which did not have that signature. “We know how many they throw away and it’s approximately speaking about 10 million a month,” said Michael Barrett, Paypal’s chief information security officer. “If the consumer never sees the e-mail in the first place then it’s hard for them to get victimized.
