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Cross-Selling Online Scams and Security Issues
An anonymous reader writes "The site 12 Angry Men recently published a discussion of a widely used but little-known online scam called 'cross-selling'. Essentially, after-sale shops cut deals with shady online retailers in an attempt to make a quick buck off of you after you've already bought something. 'What actually happens is that instead of linking to the site as a separate session, they link internally as another page in the same session. Why is this important? When you do a credit card transaction, any reputable company will attempt to protect your credit card data. They do this by establishing an SSL session to encrypt sensitive data on-line.' What makes everything even more interesting is that now the company has responded, with the usual white washing and meaningless statements."
don't you find it annoying that when you take something bad and try to make it look good it's called whitewashing
but if you take something bad and point it out to everyone it's called blacklisting
very odd how language is overtly racist
Yes, but you didn't click it, did you? You were through with the actual transaction and then applied a clue and read what it had to say before clicking like that monkey on PBS trying to get another hit of cocaine, didn't you? The people who fall for this? Same people who have machines chock full of spyware and trojans that they agreed to install when prompted. I'm certainly not going to try to defend the ethics of the assholes that run WLI since they know damn good and well they are tricking people into spending this money, but on the other hand I can't really feel sorry for the people that fall for it. Kinda like leaving your keys in the car on MLK blvd while running into the gas station for a stick of gum.