Earlier in the week The Register broke the story about how a fake Online Website has been tricking people into giving their credit card information as payment to download spyware and malware software . For many of us who use the Internet more than the average Joe, we should always be wary when using our credit card to do business with Online Websites in which we are unfamiliar. It becomes even more dangerous when we have to download software from Websites. Despite the best precautions taken we are sometimes still tricked by online scammers who are much smarter than us.
What makes this story interesting is the fact that it leads to Barbados. Here is an extract from page 5 of the article posted on The Register Website.
If you chose to actually pay for the software you will be directed to https://secure.software-payment.com. That site is hosted out of Bridgetown, Barbados. According to several websites, software-payment.com appears to be a bit of a favorite among those pushing fake anti-malware. This forum thread has a list of other fake anti-malware that used it for their billing services.
The software costs $49.95 as shown in Figure 9. However, when you try to register it you are also offered an upgrade to File Shredder 2008, for only $39.95. It is not clear whether that upgrade destroys your data only locally, or whether, for that fee, the bad guys will destroy your data securely on their own servers after they use it to steal your identity and your money. You may also add premium support for $24.95.
Source: The Register
In a previous blog we highlighted the growing practice of ‘lock bumping’ and some BU commenters expressed a lack of confidence in our police force to prevent and detect such crime. What confidence do we have in our Telecommunications Division to regulate the Bajan cyberspace when they don’t even have a decent Website? This is 2008, an age when technology is the plank which is driving the ability to compete in a global market.
Can we say that Barbados has had a strategy to benefit from what the Internet has to offer any time soon?
6 responses so far ↓
David // September 6, 2008 at 5:25 pm
We did not mean to scare the BU family but we must be careful.
BAFBFP // September 6, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Must be a Guyanese immigrant
Pages tagged "barbados" // September 6, 2008 at 10:31 pm
[...] bookmarks tagged barbados Shady Software Dealers Use Barbados Payment Centre saved by 8 others greenbirrd bookmarked on 09/06/08 | [...]
Wiped Out // September 7, 2008 at 6:05 pm
David, this thing knocked out my computer…wiped clean…$200.00 to fix it. I can’t believe that the company is here.
The scout // September 12, 2008 at 3:30 am
I was following an interested post from a blogger “Teenage Girl You All Talking About”. It has seem to have dropped out of circulation. Was it getting too sensitive?
» Link Touts “tax evasion” in Barbados! Keltruth Corp.: News Blog of Keltruth Corp. - Miami, Florida, USA. // October 17, 2008 at 9:26 pm
[...] Is the Barbadian Offshore system set up to prohibit international tax evasion? Can a Police Force that is apparently either unable or unwilling to complete a simple online contact form be an effective deterrent in this age of sophisticated electronic transactions? Related: Shady Software Dealers Use Barbados Payment Centre [...]