Legitimate Offers and Phishing
I just got a seemingly legit email offer for a Yahoo! Titanium Visa Card.
We'll ignore the fact that I do not want more credit cards (cash is king!) and I sincerely doubt it is made of titanium, or even bismuth, another pretty shiny metal.
What's important is that I immediately assumed this email was a phishing scam! It seems legit though. I have a MyYahoo! account and I've authorized them to occasionally spam - errr, email me, and I don't mind. But due to the plethora of phishing emails I receive, I immediately assumed it was sent by a criminal attempting to defraud me!
A sad state of affairs, but if almost every financial offer you receive is an attempt at robbing you, or almost everyone who approaches you on the street wants to take something from you, you get pretty paranoid.
I started out paranoid. Paranoid, yet friendly. I'm less friendly now. I do NOT give emails the benefit of the doubt - it's simply impractical.
Phishing has an concrete negative impact on ecommerce that goes beyond the money stolen: consumers, i.e. most Internet users, are less likely to engage in legitimate activity due to very "reasonable" paranoia.
We'll ignore the fact that I do not want more credit cards (cash is king!) and I sincerely doubt it is made of titanium, or even bismuth, another pretty shiny metal.
What's important is that I immediately assumed this email was a phishing scam! It seems legit though. I have a MyYahoo! account and I've authorized them to occasionally spam - errr, email me, and I don't mind. But due to the plethora of phishing emails I receive, I immediately assumed it was sent by a criminal attempting to defraud me!
A sad state of affairs, but if almost every financial offer you receive is an attempt at robbing you, or almost everyone who approaches you on the street wants to take something from you, you get pretty paranoid.
I started out paranoid. Paranoid, yet friendly. I'm less friendly now. I do NOT give emails the benefit of the doubt - it's simply impractical.
Phishing has an concrete negative impact on ecommerce that goes beyond the money stolen: consumers, i.e. most Internet users, are less likely to engage in legitimate activity due to very "reasonable" paranoia.
posted by Ted Demopoulos at 11:06 PM
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