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Vishing is the practice of leveraging Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to trick private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. The term is a combination of "voice" and phishing. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the banks members into giving away their account information by confirming it at the phishers linked website. ... IP Telephony, also called Internet telephony, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. ... IP Telephony, also called Internet telephony, is the technology that makes it possible to have a telephone conversation over the Internet or a dedicated Internet Protocol (IP) network instead of dedicated voice transmission lines. ... This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the banks members into giving away their account information by confirming it at the phishers linked website. ...

Vishing exploits the public's trust in landline telephone services, which have traditionally terminated in physical locations which are known to the telephone company, and associated with a bill-payer. However, with the advent of VoIP, telephone services may now terminate in computers, which are far more susceptible to fraudluent attacks than traditional "dumb" telephony endpoints.

Example

The whole thing works like this:

1. The criminal configures a war dialer to call phone numbers in a given region.

2. When the phone is answered, an automated recording is played to alert the consumer that their credit card has had fraudulent activity and the consumer should call the following phone number immediately. The phone number could be a toll free number often with a spoofed caller ID for the financial company they are pretending to represent.

3. When the consumer calls the number, it is answered by a typical computer generated voice that tells the consumer they have reached account verification and instructs the consumer to enter their 16-digit credit card number on the key pad.

4. Once the consumer enters their credit card number, the visher has all of the information necessary to place fraudulent charges on the consumer's card.

5. The call can then be used to harvest additional details such as security PIN, expiry date, date of birth, bank account number, etc.

See also

• VoIP spam

VoIP spam is an as-yet-nonexistent problem which has nonetheless received a great deal of attention from marketers and the trade press. ...

External links

• vnunet.com story: Cyber-criminals switch to VoIP 'vishing'
• BBC News story: Criminals exploit net phone calls
• Scamdex: Scam Resource and Archive