Several years ago, experts warned Vietnamese Internet users about the appearance of phishing in Vietnam. The number of people who are the victims of phishing has been increasing rapidly over the last few years.

Though having been warned about phishing, a lot of people still fall into the traps of swindlers. Experts say that there are different phishing tricks, from naïve to complicated, and both can “bring effects”. Some victims lost several million dong, others could not access to mail or chat accounts, and all of them get upset.

Different phishing tricks

In mid 2011, many people received an email from a former Minister of Education and Training. The email was written in English, saying that the former Minister of Education and Training was traveling in the UK, when his wallet, where he kept documents and money, was stolen, because of which he could not return home. The email asked friends and relatives to help by remitting money to his accounts at Western Union or Money Gram.

The people, who got the strange email, immediately contacted the former Minister of Education and Training and realized that he was in Vietnam, not in the UK.

Minh, a woman in Go Vap district in HCM City, unexpectedly received a message from an unfamiliar mobile phone subscriber, who asked Minh to buy a Viettel’s scratch card worth 100,000 dong for him. Minh sent a message to the subscriber, asking for her personal information. The subscriber then “kept quiet” and disappeared.

Minh Hoang in district 3 in HCM City related that he once received a message which asked Hoang to remit one million dong to an account, so that the account owner got money for disease treatment. Hoang thought that a friend of his asked for help and hurriedly tried to contact the message sender at the given phone number. However, the subscriber did not answer. 

On January 29, 2012, Truong in Tan Phu district of HCM City, who was chatting with friends through Yahoo Messenger, received an invitation to share pictures with a familiar nick name. Truong then clicked the link given by the nick name after entering user name and password. As Truong could not see the images on the link, she signed out and continued chatting.

After that, the one, who chatted with Truong, invited Truong to buy mobile phone scratch cards, promising big prizes. As doubts were raised about the “friend”, Truong shifted to chat on Facebook and realized that the actual friend did not chat on Yahoo. And Truong realized that she was tricked.

Just three seconds later, Truong’s nick name was appropriated, which was later used to cheat two other people out of 2.1 million dong.

Users told to protect themselves

Experts say that currently, with sniffer technology (bugging phone calls) and key lock skill (a kind of computer virus), hackers can easily steal the accounts of people, which include user names and passwords, from Yahoo or Gmail email addresses. Once having passwords, hackers assume another person’s name to try to cheat people: they steal personal information, credit card codes…

As for Yahoo emails, once the accounts are stolen, the account owners should contact Yahoo Vietnam so as to be supported to regain the old accounts and change passwords. As for Gmail, if users do not have alternative email accounts, users should stop signing in old accounts for 24 hours. After 24 hours, users should access to the password support page, enter the user names and set passwords again by answering security questions.

According to Vo Do Thang, Director of Athena, a network security center, in order to prevent troubles, one should avoid entering user names and passwords on unfamiliar computers, because the computers might be installed with Key lock which allows to steal passwords. Users should also think of complicated passwords which contain at least 8 characters, and regular change passwords.

Source: VNN