Friday, October 05, 2007

aquent financial scam!!

I just recieved this sms text message:

You have recieved J30 from a friend! To collect them go to AqueuntFinance.com/login, temporary username: a571tnk password: gh2x3
best regards, Aquent Financial


The site is very new although it says copyright 2002 on the bottom, and apparently I had £30 in my account, lucky me!

ALl I had to do was leave my personal details and login in to my bank account via their Flash player widget....so easy......

The best bit is this - http://aquentfinance.com/fastcash/test-esl.swf just before they take your login details....

I smelt a rat so did a few google searches, and came up with aquent UK (http://www.aquent.co.uk/Contact/Locations/Europe/london.html) . They offer services to freelance/IT professionals. So the scammers are being dumb and targeting geeks...

I called Aquent UK and they said it was a fraudulent sms and to ignore it, there is an Aquent Finance in th eUSA but it is not the company running the aquentfinancial.co.uk site.

Aquent UK are investigating the scam, so drop them a lime if you get the sms.

Scamming is now coming to a mobile phone near you.

update: 13:51 BST - WHOIS details for anyone looking to find these guys

Domain Name: aquentfinance.com

Status: ok

Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com

Expiration Date: 2008-10-04
Creation Date: 2007-10-04
Last Update Date: 2007-10-04

Name Servers:
ns1.aquentfinance.com
ns2.aquentfinance.com

IP Address: 72.232.255.59
Website Status: active
Server Type: Apache 3
Cache Date: 2007-10-05 12:49:05 MST

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Chillfire -

I work for Aquent and appreciate you posting about this unfortunately innovative scam. Of course, we're addressing it on our side and I would ask that anyone else who has been the target of it to contact us in the US. My email is mgrant@aquent.com.

Thanks,

Matt

newtechi said...

The site is down now, i think this one must have been some sort of scam, beware of scamsters