phishing scams on the rise

We've been seeing a number of new phishing scams lately, mostly for fake eBay alerts, trying to get us to login to our accounts at eBay (although it doesn't really send us to eBay, but a fake site that looks like eBay and is hungry for our personal information).

The scammers are getting trickier, going so far as to include links to the official eBay page on phishing and scams. But one thing that still holds true is that is you hover your mouse over the link that they provide to supposedly "update your account" you will see that it points to some other IP or domain name that doesn't belong to eBay.

Somebody needs to figure out a way to go after these scammers and give them a dose of their own medicine. Like creating fake eBay accounts, allowing them to spoof access, only to find out where they are having their products shipped. Once you've got their location pin-pointed, you could setup a sting operation. It would be great.

Unfortunately, fraud is something that the big corporations seem content to let their insurance handle. Even though their insurance premiums may have quadrupled (or more) over the years due to the growth of fraud, they don't care because they simply pass on these additional operating costs to their customers. So in a sense, you and I are paying for the fraud to be taken care of, while many big businesses don't go after the perpetrators in any way.

I know this from experience because we've had our credit cards compromised several times now, and each time they did nothing to go after the thief, even though we had an address that he was having his fraudulent product orders shipped to. They just cancel the credit card account, let the insurance company pay off the bad debt, and issue a new card. Case closed. I guess it is not worth their time and effort to go after the "bad guy" when they can get the "good guy" (that's us) to cover the cost of their insurance by paying higher percentage interest rates.