VOIP is a powerful technology which is rapdily growing in popularity and use around both the United States and the world in general. With any potent new technology comes the inevitable attention of the criminal element who wish to harness these new abilities to benefit themselves. VOIP fraud poses specific, dangerous, and very real threats to consumers around the nation.
VOIP security is very easily compromised where consumers are concerned. Old deceptive schemes for consumers once involved only telephone calls to trick them into revealing personal information such as social security numbers, addresses, and even bank account or credit card numbers. Once email became a powerful medium, these tactics transformed into fraudulent phishing emails that attempt to collect the same information from an unsuspecting public. With VOIP technologies, these same old threats have once again evolved to VOIP fraud, and these types are more dangerous than the other two prior mediums of fraud since they combine the two of them in a single, convincing, and effective attempt at deception to collect personal and sensitive information.
The VOIP fraud attacks work like this. Since individuals are more likely to trust phone messages than they are emails, VOIP attackers take advantage of this trust. The ones that are the most dangerous are using the two methods of phone messages combined with email messages to launch more convincing and damaging attacks on consumers, lending greater credibility to the scam. As a real world example, there is an email which claims to be from PayPal requesting members to call a certain phone number in order to verify their existing account details. This again is not a new type of deceptive fraud, except that it is far more clever and diabolical than earlier such fraud was. When the people call the number listed, the fraudsters have set up this number with an automated service message requesting information to be given. The reason that this is so terribly effective is because the persons perpetrating this fraud have actually been able to record the real automated message from PayPal. Because of this clever and convincing deception, the only way a suspecting person can determine that this is a VOIP fraud attempt is through checking to see if the number which was given out in the email is really the correct PayPal customer service or security phone number. Consumers will have to be more and more careful as time passes and these kinds of VOIP fraud become more common, and more convincing still.
