MainBilling.com Notebook Order Credit Card Refund - Email Phishing Scam
24th February 2004

This email suggests that your credit card has been used to buy a ' New P3 Direct 17 Wide TFT Notebook ' and offers to cancel the order by using the link provided ...

This email (see image below) relies on recipients wanting to ensure that their credit card has not been charged for a new notebook computer.

Your credit card has, of-course, NOT been charged for this item at all, and the ruse relies on recipients entering the bogus credit card processing service site to effect a refund and cancellation of the order.

The link in the email will send you to a page which details the order (see image below) and provides links for refunding to your credit card and for refunding to your bank account.

The two options go on to require submission of your credit card or bank details and since the transaction never took place, it is with the sole prupose of retaining that information of the perpetrators' own use.

Mainbilling.com is not a credit card processing service at all, the domain has a US individual as the registrant and the site is hosted by InterNAP Network Services in the US.

There are a number of things that should give this con away, the main ones being ... i) no details of the vendor of the product, ii) no secure sign in pages (yellow padlock symbol) which you'd see in any legitimate site processing credit card trnsactions, iii) and of-course, the poor English in the email text.

If you have received this email, please remember that it is very common for these email scams to be redistributed at a later date with only slightly different content or the same but with the fake page(s) hosted by a different provider. Also, once you have received one of these hoaxes, it is also common place to receive at least another one and usually a day or two after the first, although not necessarily from the same apparent sender.

The Email ...

The first web page ...