03 October 2017

Beware genealogy credit card phishing scheme

Rick Roberts from Global Genealogy wrote to warn me about a scam being perpetrated on genealogists.

On 'offer' are "free download or printing of books (that are under other people's copyright) from a variety of publishers including Global Heritage Press, Dundurn and others."

You won`t get any book or books for the money, but you risk getting your credit card compromised. Rick`s warning is worth sharing.

When a person begins to 'register' on the liverpoolofficial.com website, to get free download of a book, they are asked to set up a password and user name.  The next screen (filesfetcher.com) asks for a credit card for identification purposes, which they claim will not be charged. At the very bottom of that screen is a light grey lettering on white sentence that states that they will be charged a regular repeating membership fee after 7 days.  Checking online testimonials it appears that the person doesn't get the free books, but they do get a monthly charge on their credit card that is for a variety values and cannot be cancelled thru the 'company'.

This looks like a scam to pull credit numbers from those who hope to get something for nothing.

The site I found our books on is (I suspect that it is not their only site insofar as the download/payment portal is different): http://liverpoolofficial.com/book/global-heritage-press  Surprise.... liverpoolofficial.com is registered to an unidentified person/company with email address in Indonesia. 

Here is a scam report on Filesfetcher downloads: https://www.onlinethreatalerts.com/article/2017/9/17/filesfetcher-com-is-a-fraudulent-website-created-by-scammers/  (of note is that there is an infamous browser hijacker by the name of 'filesfetcher' too... a coincidence?). 


1 comment:

T said...

It never ends. I spent the whole day NOT answering my phone. A whole new cycle of junk calls started Oct.1st. It seems the world is full of crooks.