Agape Blog

Multi LinkWorld Service Ltd, Mumbai (website : http://www.multilinkworld.com/) is a fraudulent company. They lure customers with their highly cost effective offers on ticket and hotel booking by promoting heavily in reputed newspapers and franchise Magazine across different states. Once the party pay the amount, no one get any acknowledgements, updates or any comments in return. Investing your hard earned money in company like Multi Link World Service Ltd is nothing but throwing it in the well. So Just Beware of such FRAUDULENTS COMPANY.

Not astonishingly, we found that most of the services we tested minimally did not provide us with the information that they claimed they would.

The majority of the services gave us little more than the name itself. often with an address that was obsolete or inaccurate. With claims of being able to provide us with full employment history, criminal records, credit history, and much more, we were sad to see that in most cases after all was said and done, we could have found the alike information in the local phone book!

Although most of the services we reviewed fell short of our expectations, we recommend you to choose a service that truly stood out from the crowd which would provide you nearly all the information you are looking for… including extensive contact info (email addresses, phone numbers, and both work and home addresses), criminal records, credit history, residential history, and extensive employment history. And basic information for:

When should you report the Cyber Crime?
• Spyware
• Phishing
• Spam
• Identity Theft
• Online Shopping Fraud

Spyware: Spyware can steal your credit card numbers and passwords. Switch your home page, or re-direct your web searches to unwanted sites. Display annoying ads, slow your PC to a crawl, or even control it remotely. If you think your computer has spyware, report cyber crime.

Phishing: Phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and financial information from recipients. Typically, the messages appear to come from well known and trustworthy Web sites. Store e-mail spam that phish for information about your company, bank, or organization. Lodge your cyber crime & forward the respective email information.

Spam: Spam is unwanted, invasive Internet advertising, typically for get-rich-quick schemes, or probable scams. Spam consumes your resources. Networks of virus-infected computers, Botnets (number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions including spam or viruses to other computers on the Internet) are used to send about 80% of spam. E-mail addresses are collected from chartrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users’ address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. Report your complain & forward the respective message.

Identity Theft: It is a term used to refer to fraud that involves someone pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits. The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it. The person whose identity is used can suffer various consequences when he or she is held responsible for the perpetrator’s actions. If your information has been misused, file a report about your identity theft.

Online Shopping Fraud: If you have problems during a transaction, try to work them out directly with the seller, buyer or the website operator. If that does fails, file your complaint.

Jayesh Bellani
Executive: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc

With the ongoing cyber related threats turning bigger, more sophisticated and deadlier, it is time to rethink & relook every single click you make while surfing on the Internet.

It is critical to know these lurking threats so that you don’t fall prey to scamsters and fraudsters and compromise your security and money. Below is a list of some of the common tricks played by scammers.

1) `You have not paid for the item you recently won on eBay. Please click here to pay.’
2) `You’ve been let go. Click here to register for severance pay.’
3) `This mail is (name of the person) from tech services. Your PC is infected.’
4) `Someone has a secret crush on you! Click on this link to find who it is!
5) `Did you see this video of you? Check out this link!’
6) `Please confirm this order’
7) `Check out our new Discount menu’
`I’m traveling and I’ve lost my wallet. Can you wire some money?

For detailed information visit http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/4249057.cms

Have you heard of this? A number of scams are coming to light now-a-days through the web. One of them is known as the Craigslist scam. Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities with free online classified advertisements like jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and great resource for selling things, finding apartments, locating services and meeting people etc. It is an upcoming and a great service but it never comes with some risk. If you deal with people you aren’t meeting face to face you risk getting scammed.

The buyer and seller on Craigslist are not alert to the danger or deception. Most of these scams follow the same pattern that we see on eBay and other online auction sites. Try posting some easily-mailed valuable item for sale and the first response you get will probably be someone trying to trick you into believing it’s true.

Advice on avoiding scams to people using Craigslist service-

• Deal locally with folks you can meet in
• Never wire funds online, money gram or any other wire service - anyone who asks you to do so is a scammer.
• Fake cashier checks & money orders are common, and banks will cash them and then hold you responsible when the fake is discovered weeks later.
• Never give out financial information (bank account number, social security number, eBay/PayPal info, etc.)
• Avoid deals involving shipping or escrow services and know that ONLY A SCAMMER WILL “GUARANTEE” YOUR TRANSACTION.

Michelle Mitra
Executive: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc

The month of March in recent years has set email volume records, but this March is well off the pace. Last year we saw an average of 153 billion messages per day, while this March averaged only about 100 billion messages per day, as per the report issued by McAfee.

The McColo network was not only the large source of spam in the US, but also trafficked in child pornography and malware. McColo a web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was unplugged. Researchers estimated that spam levels dropped about 60 percent after McColo was closed.

E-mail security firm IronPort said spam levels fell by roughly 66 percent. Spamcop.net, another spam watch dog, found a similar decline, from about 40 spam e-mails per second to around 10 per second after the web hosting company was unplugged.

McAfee detected nearly twelve million new IP addresses operating as “zombies,” computers under the control of spammers and others. This is a significant increase over the levels from the last quarter of 2008, with an increase of nearly 50 percent. The third quarter of 2008 also posted a record number of new zombies, but it was exceeded this quarter by one million. And although the spam volume levels have not yet recovered from the McColo shutdown, the activity level of new zombies indicates that the spammers are working hard to regain the infrastructure lost and that volumes will return to previous levels sometime soon.

View McAfee Threats Report: First Quarter 2009 here.

As credit card use is on the rise and plastic cards slowly replacing cash, it won’t be far when the common man will use smart cards freely for everyday transactions. But wait! Is it safe? However, hookies that had shifted their hooks sometime back on stealing credit card data, selling them to fraudsters and duping banks with multi-billion dollars every year, creating a wave of bankruptcy for major player banks. These transactions ask for the 16-digit code on the front of the card, and expiry date and some also ask for the three-digit security card on the back. All of these details are available to a fraudster who has a stolen credit card.

Every person has some or the other doubt in mind about using credit card. There’s a good news…Visa is launching a smart card with in-guilt display that will be extremely secured during operation and will require a four digit code in addition to the three-digit security code generated by the card, before a transaction could go through making online fraud pretty difficult if not impenetrable.

This processed technology known as the Emue system should be launched by the end of this year. Employees at Deloitte are working on this new card system to find if any vulnerability is present. Adding an extra layer for online transactions and being a consumer focused product, visa banks would welcome this system open heartedly. The developers of this emue system say that it automatically generates and displays a unique code each time it is used. Work on the battery back-up part is still in progress but should run a couple of years without trouble.

Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaints
Agape Inc.

Internet crime is everywhere, from pharmaceutical sites, to malware that logs your keystrokes, to 419 scams, to money mule services. It’s getting more and more difficult for spammers to succeed through emails, and many are beginning to text message instead of email. A new type of attack that is gaining speed is Smishing or sms phishing. The term Smishing was coined in by David Rayhawk, a senior researcher at McAfee Avert Labs.

With the growth in messaging service subscriptions and cell phone providers looking to compete against the Internet, mobile device users are increasingly becoming targets for hackers, spam and other attacks that attempts to trick them into revealing personal information because people are much more accustomed to ignoring spam emails, but not text messages.

Scammers have really gone high tech now with smishing becoming the new buzzword. Smishing is a security attack in which user’s are tricked into downloading a Trojan, virus or other malware onto their cellular phone or to the network and add massive charges to corporate cell phone bills. What is does is that some messages are sent which warn the consumer about getting charged unless he/she cancels the supposed order by going to a website that then extracts such sensitive information like credit card details, passwords and other private data.

How to stay safe:-
• Never Open/Respond to messages from unknown sources.
• Verify the source/content of all unexpected messages.
• Don’t send text messages in response to Ads for free ring tones, jokes, horoscopes, etc.
• Never provide any form of financial or personal information in response to an unsolicited message.

Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaint

Cyber squatter is continuously involved in offence of blocking domain name on the name of popular companies or celebrities. It is emerging as a serious threat. A mass domain name registration by unauthorised resellers is leading to trafficking in well-known brands and are stepping stones to fraud, phishing and smishing.

Allegations of cybersquatting by trademark holders continued to rise in 2008, with a record 2,329 complaints filed under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP), a quick and cost-effective dispute resolution procedure administered by the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center. This represented an 8% increase over 2007 in the number of generic and country code Top Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes handled and brings the total number of WIPO cases filed under the UDRP since it was launched ten years ago to over 14,000. India-based entities have filed 219 such cases in the last five years.

In 2008 cases covered a wide variety of sectors, reflecting prevailing public interest, business activity and upcoming events (e.g., Singapore Flyer observation wheel, Madrid 2016 Olympic bid, Montreal Jazz Festival, Golden Globes); transportation (e.g., Air France, Austrian Airlines, BMW, Lufthansa, Southwest Airlines, Subaru); hotels (e.g., Taj Hotels, InterContinental Hotels, The Sheraton/Westin Hotels); media and publishing (e.g., the BBC, Edmonton Journal, National Geographic, Harvard University Press); educational institutions (e.g., The John Hopkins University, Sydney University, Yale University, TOEFL); computers and electronics (e.g., Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, computer manufacturer Gateway, Samsung); sports teams, leagues and personalities (e.g., English Premier League, the Arsenal Football Club, as well as its player Cesc Fàbregas, yachting’s Volvo Ocean Race, former basketball star Dennis Rodman, Adidas); actors and personalities past (e.g., Ian Fleming, Gene Kelly) and present (e.g., Scarlett Johansson); fashion (e.g., Christian Dior, Lancôme); popular culture (e.g., Barbapapa, Bob the Builder, Marvel Comics’ Xmen); numerical identifiers (e.g., 4711); and other familiar enterprises and groups such as Breitling, Canada Post, Coca-Cola, Ebay, Ghirardelli Chocolate, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Google, Hard Rock Café, LEGO, Nestlé, Ticketmaster, and Western Union. A case was also filed by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in relation to the Monticello estate.

The top five sectors for complainant business activity were biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, banking and finance, Internet and IT, retail, and food, beverages and restaurants. As in 2007, pharmaceutical manufacturers remained the top filers due to numerous permutations of protected names registered for web sites offering or linking to online sales of medications.

In order to solve this problem there is needed new amendments on IPR policy and to redesign the process of domain name allotment. Besides require more number of independent arbitration and mediation of Intellectual Property disputes.

Prabhat Tiwari
Manager: Fraud Management System
Agape Inc.

You secure everything in your life. You save money for your child’s education; you save money to buy a nice home for your family, and you also save money for emergency situations. This is why you work hard in order to get a good job with a sufficient salary to live a comfortable life.

However, there are people out there who would do just about anything to get what they want and that includes stealing. Many people have become victims of a very serious crime called identity theft, which often resulted in losing a lot of money and getting sued by several people because of fraud they didn’t even commit. If you think you are taking all the necessary steps in order to protect yourself from being victimized by this very serious crime, you should think again. Today, a lot of people use the internet for cheap communication, for researching and also for buying goods and services. It is a very efficient tool where you can really benefit from.

If you use the internet to purchase things, then you are vulnerable in becoming a victim of identity theft. Since the internet today is used for a lot of transactions, there are people who are also using the internet to steal from other people. They develop different kinds of programs that can enter your computer without you knowing about it, or they can also send you phishing emails for scamming you into providing your personal and financial information. So, you now ask how you will be able to protect yourself from getting victimized by the number of malicious software’s circulating in the internet today, and how to prevent it from entering your computer. First of all, the best way to protect yourself from being a victim is to simply stop using the internet or be careful on answering emails or on visiting websites.

However, this can prove to be too inconvenient. The internet is considered to be one of the most important tools in life today. You will need the internet for surfing, for work, for entertainment, etc. So, the next best thing to consider is by installing internet security software in your computer to protect you from people circulating the internet and malicious software such as computer viruses, spyware, adware, and hackers.

Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaint

V Narayan | TNN

Mumbai: A day after Thane college lecturer Arvind Ojha was arrested for running an online job racket, the police on Friday arrested his associate, Crypton Mirinda. Ojha is accused of duping lakhs of investors by promising them high returns within few hours through his website, earn45k.com.

Crypton Mirinda (in purple) and Arvind Ojha

Mirinda was one of the 5,000 distributors appointed by Ojha for mailing investors the “business kit’’ containing instructions. The distributors were paid Rs 200 for every kit they sent to the investors. “Mirinda earned Rs 70,000 a month and was aware of the scam,’’ a police officer said.

Ojha had set up a company, Cosmos Infomedia India Pvt Ltd. He had tied up with telecom companies to send SMSes to mobile users stating, “Earn Rs 45,000 within 2-3 hours sitting at home’’.

Victims would then log on to Ojha’s website which claimed to fetch them crores in a month. Ojha, the brain behind the scam, claims to have got the idea after reading Mail Order Business, said investigating officer and inspector Prabhakar Loke.

On Friday, victims called up on Ojha’s cellphone. Police officials attended to the calls and took down details. The police have frozen Ojha’s bank account.

WEB OF LIES
Arvind Ojha, a science teacher at a Thane college, set up Cosmos Infomedia India Pvt Ltd and operated a website, earn45k.com to lure investors, he tied up with telecom companies to send out SMSes stating the victims were asked to send a demand draft/ pay order of Rs 595 each of the victim received a ‘money making kit’ . The victims were asked to enroll three other members and pay another Rs 1,000 as membership fees and Rs 200 each for five distributors whose details were provided in the kit.