From Understanding Telephone Scams to Implementing Authenticated Caller ID Transmission

abstract: The telephone network is used by almost every person in the modern world. With the rise of Internet access to the PSTN, the telephone network today is rife with telephone spam and scams. Spam calls are significant annoyances for telephone users, unlike email spam, spam calls demand immediate attention. They are not only significant annoyances but also result in significant financial losses in the economy. According to complaint data from the FTC, complaints on illegal calls have made record numbers in recent years. Americans lose billions to fraud due to malicious telephone communication, despite various efforts to subdue telephone spam, scam, and robocalls. In this dissertation, a study of what causes the users to fall victim to telephone scams is presented, and it demonstrates that impersonation is at the heart of the problem. Most solutions today primarily rely on gathering offending caller IDs, however, they do not work effectively when the caller ID has been spoofed. Due to a lack of authentication in the PSTN caller ID transmission scheme, fraudsters can manipulate the caller ID to impersonate a trusted entity and further a variety of scams. To provide a solution to this fundamental problem, a novel architecture and method to authenticate the transmission of the caller ID is proposed. The solution enables the possibility of a security indicator which can provide an early warning to help users stay vigilant against telephone impersonation scams, as well as provide a foundation for existing and future defenses to stop unwanted telephone communication based on the caller ID information.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

The psychology of scams: Provoking and committing errors of judgement

According to the Office of Fair Trading (2006), 3.2 million adults in the UK fall victim to mass marketed scams every year, and collectively lose £3.5 billion. Victims of scams are often labelled as 'greedy' or 'gullible' and elicit the reaction, 'How on earth could anyone fall for that?' However, such labels are unhelpful and superficial generalisations that presume all of us are perfectly rational consumers, ignoring the fact that all of us are vulnerable to a persuasive approach at one time or another. Clearly, responding to a scam is an error of judgement – so our research sought to identify the main categories of decision error that typify victim responses, and to understand the psychology of persuasion employed by scammers to try to provoke such errors.UK Office of Fair Tradin

Users really do respond to smishing

Text phish messages, referred to as Smishing is a type of social engineering attack where fake text messages are created, and used to lure users into responding to those messages. These messages aim to obtain user credentials, install malware on the phones, or launch smishing attacks. They ask users to reply to their message, click on a URL that redirects them to a phishing website, or call the provided number. Thousands of mobile users are affected by smishing attacks daily. Drawing inspiration by the works of Tu et al. (USENIX Security, 2019) on Robocalls and Tischer et al. (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2016) on USB drives, this paper investigates why smishing works. Accordingly, we designed smishing experiments and sent phishing SMSes to 265 users to measure the efficacy of smishing attacks. We sent eight fake text messages to participants and recorded their CLICK, REPLY, and CALL responses along with their feedback in a post-test survey. Our results reveal that 16.92% of our participants had potentially fallen for our smishing attack. To test repeat phishing, we subjected a set of randomly selected participants to a second round of smishing attacks with a different message than the one they received in the first round. As a result, we observed that 12.82% potentially fell for the attack again. Using logistic regression, we observed that a combination of user REPLY and CLICK actions increased the odds that a user would respond to our smishing message when compared to CLICK. Additionally, we found a similar statistically significant increase when comparing Facebook and Walmart entity scenario to our IRS baseline.Comment: CODASPY'2

Scammed Posting Detector: A Case Study of Pet Scammed Posting

Nowadays, there are many people are being victims of the internet scam. Scammer performs the scam in order to gain money from the victims. Pet scam is one of the scams that contribute to the increase of the internet scam cases. Pet scam starts from the pet scammed posting which is the fake posting about pet sales or adoptions in the online auction site. Due to the unawareness of online buyer on the pet scamming activities and the current pet scam applications are not able to notify the user on the potential pet scam, the pet scam detector which used to detect and alert the user on the potential pet scam must be developed. Usually, the victims of the pet scam are the pet lovers and online buyers. Therefore, they are the target user for this application. Besides, the research on the previous pet scammed emails, the interview of the experienced pet scam victim, and the survey on the public awareness regarding pet scam had been conduct to support the method applied. The results of these pilot studies help to derived the pet scammed email patterns which is useful in the development of the projects

Методичні вказівки до практичних занять та самостійної роботи з розвитку умінь та навичок професійного спілкування англійською мовою

Дані методичні вказівки призначені для аудиторних занять з іноземної мови під керівництвом викладача, а також можуть використовуватися для самостійного опрацювання. Методичні вказівки спрямовані на оволодіння необхідним граматичним та лексичним матеріалом з англійської мови. Робота складається з двох розділів, в яких подано сучасні тексти з наукових видань за спеціальностями комп’ютерних та інформаційних технологій, що дозволяють використовувати методичні вказівки для повторення вивченого матеріалу, для самостійної роботи з текстами в аудиторії та вдом

Online romance scams and victimhood

Online romance scams defraud dating website users of large amounts of money and inflict serious psychological harm. Victims of these scams often blame themselves for their losses and are blamed by others. We consider whether victims actually do share responsibility with the scammer for their losses. Three sorts of cases are particularly relevant: (i) where there are relatively many abortive meetings and even more fruitless money transfers in a single scam; (ii) where someone is a repeat scam victim; and (iii) where the victim has been warned by authorities that they are currently a victim of a scam and pay anyway. We argue that responsibility sometimes is shared, but that losses can be out of proportion to imprudence. Scam victims sometimes violate epistemic norms, but in ways that are peculiar to romantic attachment. The paper combines the methods of qualitative psychological research on scam victims and analytic philosophy (Research for this paper was supported by Grant EP/N028112/1 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)

MF2228

Reprinted through funding provided by PATH, Personal Actions to Health, an initiative of the Kansas Health Foundation and K-State Research and Extension.; Developed in consultation with the Kansas Association for Family and Community Education Educational Committee.Doris "Katey" Walker, Be a winner avoid consumer fraud, October 1996