Saturday October 20 2007 02:49 IST
HYDERABAD: Netizens, beware! "Cybersquatters" are on the prowl. If you get any unsolicited spam e-mails offering banking transactions, never reply to them, much less divulge details of your financial dealings, including credit card or bank account numbers.
This caution is not only being given to individuals but even to companies selling branded products as the threat looms large over these firms in India.
The problem has already engulfed several companies in the US and Europe where hundreds of firms engaged in financial services, along with their customers, have become bankrupt after the latter unwittingly provided details of financial dealings online to the Cybersquatters.
Cybersquatting is used by phishers to convince the recipients of their emails to respond to cleverly misspelt brand names of major banks, commercial products, e-retailers and credit card companies.
The modus operandi of the phishers is simple. They send e-mails to Internet addicts, gain their confidence and lead them to counterfeit websites that are a one-letter misspell of their bank’s domain name.
Because these typo domain names are very similar to the real ones, consumers are often tricked into divulging financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames, passwords and other details to the scammers.
For instance, Colgate, which is a brand name for half a dozen products, is bedevilled by 100 registered domains which are confusingly similar to the original brand name. Some variants include Ccolgate, Calgate and Cilgate.
Dogging Microsoft, the global giant in software industry, are 581 misspelt domains, and Compaq computers and Palmolive are harried by 163 and 36 respectively.
Even personalities like Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy, Telugu Desam supremo N Chandrababu Naidu and late chief minister NT Rama Rao have three domains each registered by the Cybersquatters.
The record number of such misspelt domains are in the name of US celebrity Paris Hilton, who has as many as 1,974 domains, followed by pop singer Britney Spears (1,341). Hollywood’s famous couple Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt have 371 and 279 domains respectively. One of the main reasons for the increase in the Cybersquatter menace is attributed to the low prices of Internet domain names.
"Anyone can pay US $ 30-40 per year and register a domain in the United States," Infotech’s Deputy General Manager (IT Infrastructure) Shiv Prasad told this website's newspaper.
According to him, there were no provisions in the existing cyber laws to curb the menace and the Central Government, which is reworking the IT Act, should keep this in view before finalising the new IT legislation. The Central Government has capped the problem to some extent by asking the business entities to register their companies’ domain with ‘.in’ at the end.
"But we cannot do anything in respect of individuals (read unscrupulous elements) registering the domains in the names of their choice," a senior official in the Information Technology department said.
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