SCAMSTERS INC.

“In this regard it is stated that no such notice has been issued by the Ministry of Labour and Employment,” it added.

Huwaei, which manufactures telecom equipment in China and sells globally, including in India, has a reserach and development centre in Bangalore.

Reports in the media Tuesday said the ministry issued Huawei a notice Monday, accusing it of committing serious legal and financial violations, including tax frauds.

Even before the ministry issued the formal denial, a top company official told IANS his company was investigating the “authenticity” of the letter.

“We have 200 Chinese staff who have come to India on a valid business visa and who leave the country within the prescribed time limit once the discussions are over,” the official said requesting anonymity.

He termed it as “a trick” to create a “scare” in the market so that Huawei loses out on upcoming bids for telecom tenders floated by various service providers.

“We will speak to the Labour Commissioner and tell him that someone probably is misusing the letterhead of the ministry,” the official said.

After the ministry issued the statement, he said he was relieved. “We had never flouted norms and knew things will be fine.”

“We were unable to process your most recent payment. Did you recently change your bank, phone number or credit card?”

The email then prompts the user to click on a link to update their info. The link is actually fake, and leads to a site owned by a Gmail user in Romania. The site steals the personal information of anyone who falls for the ruse and enters it into the phony Apple page.

This is the second time this year that phishers have targeted Apple. In May a similar email was sent to users of the immensely popular iTunes service. Security experts believe that phishers are aiming these attacks at Apple services to take advantage of Apple’s reputation of being more secure than Windows. They are banking on Apple users thinking such attacks could never happen to them and as a result not being wary of such emails. It appears that Apple users are not getting a rather rude wake up call. To scammers, no OS is off limits.

Krishna Murthy has already met and held discussions with the concerned officials from the Sports Ministry and the Sports Authority of India.

He met Monika on Thursday and is now awaiting a written report from her.

He is scheduled to meet the officials of Indian Weightlifting Federation on August 26 and submit the inquiry report soon after his investigations are complete.

The Sports Ministry had ordered an inquiry, to be conducted by one-member committee of Krishna Murthy, to look into all aspects of the issues relating to Monika's dope testing, the timing and release of the report which led to withdrawal of the Manipuri lifter from the Indian Olympic contingent just hours before her scheduled departure to Beijing.

Source: The Hindu

Srinivasan, who was leading a quiet retired life got a mail a few days ago, purportedly from the security department of Punjab National Bank, asking him to update his personal details by clicking a link given in the mail, to make the bank account more secure.

"The mail said that the bank was stepping up vigil against online frauds and told the account holder that he could continue using his account even during the updation process without affecting transactions. Believing this, Srinivasan clicked on the link in the mail and provided his personal information including the bank account number," a CCB official told The Times of India.

Srinivasan found his net banking facility blocked moments after he replied to the mail, but he didn't realise the enormity of the fraud. "He then sent a mail to Neelam Singh, a person named as the signatory and security head of the Punjab National Bank in the phishing mail. When he did not get a reply to the mail, Srinivasan went and checked with the bank, only to find that Rs 21 lakh had been withdrawn from his account," the official said.

Preliminary investigation by the CCB bank fraud wing and the cyber crime cell revealed that a woman had withdrawn the amount from an ICICI bank branch in Mumbai. "When we made inquiries, the bank authorities said that the woman had been making repeated inquiries about remittance of cash to a particular account saying that she was expecting the money from an urgent property transaction. The money was withdrawn from the account soon after it was credited," the official added.

Investigators are now trying to trace the internet protocol number from which the mail to Srinivasan was sent. "We don't think the mail originated from Mumbai. We are trying to locate the woman who had collected the amount. We will crack the network as soon as we locate the woman," the official said.

The official underscored the need for better awareness among people transacting through net banking. "People getting such mails should immediately check with the bank concerned. Before performing any banking transactions through the net, follow the instructions provided by the banks and look for security emblems and marks on the home page of the bank," the official said.

People and institutions trading in mail addresses and other data are proving to be a headache for banks and security agencies. "These institutions are paid Rs 10 per mail address. These are a readymade pool for fraudsters to work on. Make sure that you do not give out your mail addresses to people and institutions that are unknown to you," the official said.

Source:TOI

The CBI officials raided the residences, offices of the NGO and visited the LIC headquarters as well as a Karad Urban Co-op Bank branch on Thursday in a bid to seize ‘incriminating documents’. The CBI had learnt that the beneficiaries of the policy were being cheated of the insurance money as the fraudsters opened bogus bank accounts and misappropriated the money. “We recently registered a case of forgery and fraud under IPC and Prevention of Corruption Act against the three accused and unknown officials of the LIC and Karad Bank,” said a CBI official on the condition of anonymity.

The Janashree policy is an insurance scheme which has people below the poverty line as beneficiaries and NGOs as nodal agencies. A senior LIC officer confirmed that CBI officials had visited the office. “Two months back too the CBI had visited our office with a similar case of a Solapur-based NGO misappropriating the insurance money. Later they had ruled out LIC’s involvement,” he said.

When contacted, the General Manager of the Raviwar Peth branch of Karad Bank, Suraj Shah said he was unaware of any such CBI inquiry.

Source: Express India

The module uses the VIP Fraud Detection Service's self-learning behavioral engine to spot pump and dump activity by tracking and weighing multiple factors including stock risk, user behaviours, how trading compares to typical fraudulent trades and the network effect that occurs when many users are making similar trades.

The VIP Fraud Detection Service Stock Trading Module will help prevent losses attributed to stock manipulation schemes that artificially hype the price of a thinly-traded stock or penny stock. One type of scheme dupes legitimate traders into buying such a stock on rumour.

Another scheme involves the takeover of user accounts and purchases penny stock in large quantities. In both cases, when the stock price rises, fraudsters quickly dump their shares, collecting gains for themselves and causing investors and brokerages to lose money.

To demonstrate the losses attributed to pump and dump schemes, in June 2008, Dow Jones Newswires reported that a particular pump and dump scheme involving stock from GTX Global netted more than $31 million in profits1. And in the fall of 2007, Kiplingers.com reported that pump and dump schemes from spam campaigns alone cost investors billions of dollars a year, according to SEC estimates2.

Chris Christiansen, program vice president, Security Products and Services at IDC, said: "New stock frauds are far more sophisticated than the 'traditional pump and dump' scams. The attacks enable criminals to fraudulently pump up an unknown stock's price via unauthorised purchases from co-opted accounts. VeriSign offers a unique service that protects traders at the transaction level and customer's accounts from being compromised."

Because VeriSign can detect the fraud while it's taking place, traders and brokerages are protected from potentially huge losses. Until now, brokerages had to rely on counter measures including restrictive stock trading or solutions that only alert brokerages after trading has taken place and the money is already gone.

Fran Rosch, vice president of Identity and Authentication Services at VeriSign, said: "Fraud isn't just a cost of doing business, it also undermines consumer confidence. With the new Stock Trading Module, we extended the existing functionality of our VIP Fraud Detection Service to proactively identify fraud before damage can be done. Preventing pump and dump types of schemes makes a huge difference, and it's one only VeriSign can provide."

As well as some superimposed fireworks, it’s also come out that the gorgeous little Chinese girl in the red dress who ‘sang’ the patriotic song ‘Ode to the Motherland’ didn’t even sing a note. Cute Lin Miaoke mimed the entire song and was only chosen to appear in the opening ceremony because she was considered to be more visually appealing than the child that actually sang the song.

The musical director of the ceremony, Chen Qiganag, stated that the actual singer, Yang Peiyi was not chosen because they wanted to “project the right image, we were thinking about what was best for the nation”. Apparently what’s right for the nation isn’t showing a normal
seven-year-old with a slightly chubby face and crooked teeth, but a perfect, flawless face that can’t sing a note. Maybe the Chinese are more like us Westerners than we realize.

Source:snarkerati

A Malaysian cook’s shopping spree using fake credit cards to purchase electronic items came to an end after he was nabbed by the city’s police following a tip-off last week.

When I first became aware of the scam on August 2, I noticed the website, www.bejingticketing.com was ranked 4th for the term “olympics tickets” on Google.

After all of the free PR and the buzz created from the scam becoming public and more importantly the hundred of new links from media sites published around the world, the website jumped to the #2 spot a few days later. Thankfully the site has been taken down, but not before the damage was already done.

From the first moment I saw the website it was clear very that SEO had been utilised to gain traction in search engines such as Google. The combination of highly targeted content and a professional design was a clear giveaway why it ranked so well and milked hundreds of people around the world out of their hard earned dollars.

By using and repeating keywords focused around tickets for the various sports and Olympic ceremonies throughout the content, Meta Title and navigation, it’s easy to see that SEO formed the base of their marketing strategy from the beginning. These guys knew what they were doing and utilised SEO and links from other websites to drive traffic to their website.

So who’s to blame? The scammers, the consumers for their lack of homework, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Beijing Olympics Committee (BOC) for not policing their own brands or Google for sending their customers to the site?

Of course the real culprits are the criminals who took people’s money without providing the product. But I also believe, The IOC and BOC have to take some responsibility for not policing their own brands and trademarks. In an age where tools exist to keep track of where a brand is being used online the IOC and BOC could have identified the website sooner and dealt with it accordingly.

While it’s easy to calculate the consumer loss, the damage done to the IOC’s and BOC’s brand is another story and ultimately very difficult to determine. Of course the IOC has overcome worse situations such as drug cheats, vote buying and corrupt officials so weathering this latest fiasco should be a breeze.

However, if the same situation was applied to a well know business brand, the consequences could be devastating for the business if not dealt with appropriately. Today, tools such as Adgooroo’s Trademark Insight and services such as Online Reputation Management can be used to keep a close eye on a brand or trademark and companies can learn firsthand what consumers or scammers are saying immediately rather than waiting until it gets out of control.

Blaming the consumer for not purchasing tickets from an official ticketing source is no longer the answer.

When MSNBC carried a Forbes Traveler article, initially published late February, it carried links to at least one fake ticketing site, sites that have since disappeared from the actual page, pulled sometime between the end of July and now, it led to implied legitimacy for the site and helped it gain a search engine position and helped lead many down the path of losing large amounts of money.

By silently fixing the article, MSNBC have contributed to the confusion as to how people were led into believing the site was legitimate. If you or your site find yourself in the position of having to amend something that you have already published online, you need to make sure that visitors can tell that you have amended the original page and at least identify what has changed. MSNBC's silent fix, without any acknowledgement that the original links might not have been appropriate, is the worst possible way to deal with things, it is even worse than leaving the information as it was - at least then people could identify where the implied legitimacy had originated from.

Just to make it clear, this is NOT THE REAL BEIJING GAMES TICKET SITE, this one is. Does it mean that the Chinese Olympic organisers have failed to secure all probable online domains before selling tickets? It is impossible to completely close off the multitude of possible domains that might be set up to try and sell tickets, so the organisers aren't really at fault for that. Could they have made more effort to secure likely domains? Probably. Then again, hindsight is always perfect.

Key to the whole incident is how trust is allocated and determined when interacting with new sites on the Internet. It actually highlights one of the biggest problems with establishing viable online trust. If a site, such as MSNBC, that you would normally otherwise trust, provides a link to a malicious site and claims it is legitimate, how would you be able to differentiate if the link is malicious if you had never been there before? Under almost any trust model that exists, the site would have gained trustworthy status earlier this year, when MSNBC first linked to it. Where the trust breakdown took place was when people failed to receive their tickets and it was realised that the site was claiming ticket availability for events that had long been completely sold out. Some of the more advanced trust models that are in development (such as the one developed by Sûnnet Beskerming) would have given the site a dubious weighting, but would have struggled to offset the implied trust delivered by other sites against the Official Beijing site, which should have been the only one to offer tickets for sale.

The seven-member committee will also record the evidence on August 7 of three BJP MPs who shocked the nation by tabling bundles of currency notes alleging that the money was given to them as bribes to abstain from the trust vote.

The committee headed by senior Congress MP V Kishore Chandra Deo has been asked to submit its report by August 11. But Deo said the panel will seek extension till the month-end to complete its task.

After watching the tapes for nearly three hours, the committee has asked the Lok Sabha Secretariat to make the transcript available to the members.

The committee also asked CNN-IBN channel, which had conducted the sting operation but came under BJP's attack for not telecasting it, to send its representative on August 11, Deo said.

In their petition seeking a probe into the charge that attempt was made to bribe them to get their support in the trust vote, the three MPs -- Ashok Argal, Fagan Singh Kulaste and Mahavir Bhagora -- are believed to have named SP General Secretary Amar Singh and Congress leader Ahmed Patel. Both members of Rajya Sabha denied the charge.

Panel receives two more tapes

The committee also received two more tapes -- one from Amar Singh and another from expelled BJP leader Uma Bharti, who has been alleging the hands of the saffron party itself in the scam.

Deo said the panel is not in a hurry to see the two tapes. "We have not seen them. We will watch them later if need be and whether they are relevant to the present case," he said.

Deo also said that the committee will summon Samajwadi Party MP Reoti Raman Singh at a later stage. Singh, who represents Allahabad constituency, is a member of the Lok Sabha unlike Amar Singh and Patel who are members of the Upper House.

Reoti Raman Singh has also been named by the three BJP MPs in their complaint.

Deo avoided a direct reply whether Amar Singh and Patel would be summoned by the committee. "We have not come to that stage," he said.

Replying to a question whether the committee could recommend expulsion of any members if found guilty, Deo said that the panel has the power even to recommend imprisonment for 40 days from from the last day of the session.