Posted by Joe Cimoch on Thursday, September 01, 2005 at 6:50AM :
In Reply to: I am heading to New Orleans in the morning posted by Mac from Texas on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 at 8:32PM :
Good luck Mac, hope all turns out well for you and your officers. Thanks for the suggestion to donate. I'm sticking with the Red Cross. The scammers have already started opening web sites for donations.
From the Washington Post:
It was bound to happen. On a hunch that we might see phishing scams popping up that take advantage of the terrible destruction that Hurricane Katrina has wrought on the Gulf Coast, I started looking up new Web address registrations for possible scam sites. In just a few minutes, I stumbled upon Katrinahelp.com, which claims to be a donation site for Katrina victims but was almost certainly constructed to steal Paypal usernames and passwords.
The DNS records have very little information on the registrant, which should be the first red flag. The only information in the DNS record is a P.O. box address registered to one "Demon Moon."
What's more, when you click on the "donate" link on the site, you are taken to a Web site designed to look just like Paypal.com. Only problem is that if you visit the site in Firefox, you will see that the Web address in the URL field is still Katrinahelp.com, when it should be Paypal.com.