A place to report Phishing Scams

Phishing scams seem to be an epidemic these days. Text messages seem to be just the latest way for crooks to SPAM us. But take heart, CERT has setup an e-mail address for reporting phishing URLs. Send an e-mail to phishing-report@us-cert.gov with the URL in the message. In my case, I seem to have repeatedly won Target.com gift cards!!! Woo hoo!

Your entry in our drawing WON you a FREE $1000 Target Giftcard enter XXX at www.target.com.ppdf.biz/ to claim it and we can ship it to you immediately

For the non-tech savy readers, if you look at the domain name, you will notice instead of it ending in target.com the URL actually ends in target.com.ppdf.biz. This, of course, is not a Target website and is most likely a crook trying to steal your credit card number and/or other information.



It would seem to me that given someone has to actually pay for the domain that law enforcement could follow the money and shutdown these sites quickly. But when I looked at the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the FCC website for reporting similar information, filling out the forms was way too difficult. In addition, they wanted way too much information. My guess is these sites are for folks who have already been scammed. But its seems like in this case it would be better to focus on preventing crimes rather than on reporting on crimes that already happened.



For more information, see http://www.us-cert.gov/nav/report_phishing.html