2010 SCAM BEING USED ON YOU AND ME NOW
Tab Nabbing, as it's called, puts a powerful new weapon in the hands of identity thieves, and I'm about to show you how to stop it, dead in it's tracks.
These scammers are phishing for account numbers, log on details and other personal information, and it's one of the biggest scams going on right now, right on your computer. Internet users like me and you are wising up and informing each other about these scams. We are becoming more wary about clicking on unsafe links. These crooks have come up with a new trick that changes legitimate pages into bogus ones without the user even noticing the change. If I was you, I would tell every single friend I have to read this article, as if they have a computer, and they log on to that computer, this could happen to them also. So now is the time to SPREAD THE WORD. Just give them this article link and have them to put it by their computer as a reminder.
I tell you, just when I thought I'd seen it all, a new and particularly nasty form of Internet scam started. Tab nabbing poses a new identity theft threat to the Internet. Phishing, may I remind you, happens when a scammer deceives you into giving away information about yourself, mostly account details such as username and password.
This usually comes to you via an e-mail or a link on another web page. They direct you to a bogus site that looks exactly like the genuine article (like PayPal or Amazon, Craigslist, etc.) and then they capture your login details when you try to sign in. I had this happen to me on Craigslist, and all of a sudden I could not figure out why my account had posting on it that I had no idea was there (until I looked). I finally had to cancel the account and get a new one. People were e-mailing me wanting to buy things I was not even selling.
The crook can use your login details to sign on and remove money, or make purchases on your account. The internet user is being fooled into clicking on a link, where that tab nabbers plays a different and much less obvious trick. Now, if you're a regular internet user (and most of us are) you'll know how tabs work. As you know, Internet Exployer, Firefox, Safari, or Google Chrome allow you to have several pages open at once, and that allows you to hop from one to the other with one click.
Sometimes, when you click on a link in one page, it opens the new page in a seperate tab, and it's not unusual to have half a dozen or more tabs open at once. I've done it also. You even forget which ones you had open, which helps the tab nabber immensely. The way this particularly evil form of Internet Phishing works goes like this:
* You already have a couple of tabs open when you land on a page controlled by the tab nabber (You won't know this).
* While you're viewing this page, the tab nabber accesses your browsing history to see which sites you regularly visit that have value to him/her, again like Amazon, PayPal, Google, Gmail, and so forth.
* He (or she) then changes one of your tabbed pages to mimic one of these sites, complete with what looks like the genuine logo on the tab itself, hoping, when you return to this tab, you will think you must have visited the page earlier and just forgotten.
* Even better, from the tab nabber's point of view, you may really have just visited the genuine site (your bank, for example), left it open in the tab, and then returned to it to discover you seem to have been logged out.
* Either way, the aim is TO GET YOU TO THINK YOU'RE LOGGING IN AGAIN, and PRESTO, the scammer has pulled off his cunning Internet Phishing trick ON YOU.
There are 2 key aspects that make this scam much more effective that previous online phishing scams I've noted on the internet.
First, you don't have to click a link to get to the bogus page; you just click on what looks like a genuine page tab.
Second, it uses sites you habitually visit whereas phishing often seems to come from organizations you've had no dealings with, so you would immediately suspect something was wrong. In addition, if you do your banking online, the bank often will actually sign you out if there's been no activity on their page, even if you still have it open in a tab. It's not unusual to be asked to sign on again.
Beware of this also. 2 things give the tab nabbing trick away. First, although the page may look genuine, the Internet address or URL (the name of the site give in the address bar at the top of your browser) won't.
So, the real Amazon home page for instance will show "amazon.com", but a bogus page will have something quite different, even if it has the word "amazon" in it. Write this down somewhere and put it by your computer as a reminder to you.
Second, the little padlock icon that appears in your browser (usually bottom right), when you visit a secure websight, will be missing.
I hope this article has been helpful to you. Pass this article around and let your family and friends know right now about what's going on here. Please leave a comment below if this has been helpful. Look for my next article titled:
How to be doubly secure to prevent tab nabbing. Thank you.
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