Katrina Inspires Scammers

It's funny how disasters have a way of bringing out the best in people!
But, unfortunately, also the worst!
Katrina already has its stories of individual heroism and personal tragedies.

That's sad, but there is something even sadder outhere than the damage itself. And it's human. I'm talking about our fellow citizens, scammers & spammers waiting to seize upon people whose generosity and sympathy for the disaster victims inspires them to donate money to worthy causes. You all know what I mean, it happened after the Asian tsunami too.

There are spam email messages circulating offering items for sale for disaster awareness, all kind of spamvertised things.
Also, there is the "spam appeal," a mass mailing that includes a link to donate money to a worthy cause. Sometimes these come in the form of a solicitation to donate money to a known organization with a link to a "donation page";of course, it simply sends your payment information to scammers.

If you're really lucky, you get one of the classics, for example "Nigerian 419"-type scam ((where someone pretends that they need your help to transfer a large sum of money from one place to another, and asks for your bank account information to do this), so you may not be scammed.

But there are some email messages that lead you to download malware.OnlyMyEmail and F-Secure report that they've seen an email with a couple of lines of text from a news story about the Katrina disaster efforts, with a link to read more. When you clicked the link (as of this morning, now the site is shut down) the site that loaded tried to install the Phel Trojan horse program on your computer using a browser security exploit.

A serious problem is that not all the email that looks like a scam is actually a scam.
The American Red Cross was redirecting site visitors to pages on the Web site of its fundraising partner, Convio, when you clicked the Donate Now button on the Red Cross homepage. But as this seemed very suspicious to some people, the Red Cross page is now redirecting to https://give.redcross.org, which should avoid any confusion.

Bottom line, all of you who try to do something good for Katrina's victims should be very careful, because that may cause you harm.
How ironic, for something like this to happen just because someone got up this morning in a scamming mood…