South Central Communications warns against Internet scams.

   (ST George, Utah) South Central Communications officials today cautioned Internet users about two scams that are affecting people locally.
According to Luke Geddes, Internet manager for South Central, “phishing” and “spoofing” scams are spreading rapidly.
   “We’re receiving reports of people who have been hit by these schemes. Whether it’s ‘phishing’ or ‘spoofing,’ the goal of scammers is to steal your identity—they want your credit card number, social security number or other private information.”
  Geddes explained that “phishing” is a process where scammers send an e-mail to users falsely claiming to be an established legitimate business in an attempt to get them to surrender personal information.
   Spoofing is forging an e-mail header to make it appear as if it came from somewhere or someone other than the actual source.
South Central’s marketing director, Jim Harrison, was a recent target of scammers and explained what happened.
   “I have an eBay account, and a few days after I completed a transaction, I received an e-mail that looked exactly like it came from eBay—same colors, same writing style, same layout, same everything. It looked legitimate.
   “Ironically, the e-mail claimed that eBay was updating their files to protect against scams,” Harrison said.
   “The e-mail directed me to click on the link shown and I would go to a ‘secure’ site where I could confirm personal information. At the new site, which looked very official, I was asked to enter my eBay username and password and confirm my credit card number.”
Harrison concluded, “At that point, I became suspicious. I wondered why eBay was asking for information they already had on file.”
   Fortunately, Harrison didn’t take the bait. Instead, he contacted eBay and was told the e-mail was not legitimate and was asked to forward it to them for investigation.
Geddes said there has been a 1,200 percent increase since last year in phishing and spoofing but it can be stopped very quickly if users would simply not respond to those types of e-mails.
He concluded with this advice, “If something doesn’t appear quite right, it probably isn’t. No legitimate company would ever send you an e-mail asking you to verify your account information.”