Internet Phishing Fraud Alert

Fraudulent Phishing Sites Claiming to Sell Pharmaceuticals

Updated July 20, 2007

Spammers are broadcasting emails with forged return addresses falsely indicating that they were sent by someone at donwright.com. These spam emails are fraudulent. Recent broadcasts have hyped these web sites:

Phishing is the effort to entice you to reveal credit card and other personal information by fraud. Here, the emails direct you to web sites which appear to be genuine, perhaps quite professional, but which are actually engaging in fraud.

Be advised:

No one at donwright.com has ever sent an unsolicited email recommending a commercial web site, not even our own site. If you receive such an email with a return address at donwright.com, you may be confident that the email is fraudulent, it is part of a scam, and you are their target. Some characteristics of fraudulent web sites can be:

•         The email has a return address which is not the web site that the email hypes. No trustworthy company sends unsolicited email from someone else’s email address.

•         The email may direct you to type the web site’s address into your browser. This helps them get past some types of spam filters.

•         The hyped web site has no information identifying the company’s street address or telephone number, or you call the number and it is fraudulent.

•         The hyped web site says that information is entirely secure, but when you start to place an order the address line begins with “http” (not secure) rather than “https.”

Any one of those should alert you to trouble. If you see any of those problems and still give them your credit card and other personal information, you probably deserve the problems you will likely have. If you have already given up your personal information, by all means call your credit card company immediately and tell them.

More about phishing:

•         Non-profit industry organization: http://www.antiphishing.org/

•         Federal Trade Commission: http://onguardonline.gov/phishing.html

•         National Fraud Information Center: http://www.fraud.org/

At donwright.com we receive thousands of these spam emails as they bounce back from bad addresses or full mailboxes. The above-listed web sites have been reported to several lists of phishing sites, including Microsoft’s IE7 Phishing Filter.