It’s sad, but inevitable.  Just like with Hurricane Katrina and other large-scale disasters, scammers are taking advantage of the kind-hearted people who just want to help the cause.  The most recent one has to do with the California wildfires.  Malware has been developed to ask people to donate to the cause, when it fact they will only be donating to the scammers’ bank account.  Since this will obviously not be the last disaster, one thing to keep in mind is that whenever you want to donate to a cause, make sure you always do it through an authoritative source.  Never go through a middle-man, since this is how all of these scammers make their money.  Donating to authority sites like www.redcross.org will ensure you that your donations are going to the right place.

The California wildfire disaster, like so many other tragedies involving loss of life, has become the subject of an online scam. If the history of incidents like the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster and Hurricane Katrina is anything to go by, fire-themed malware is likely to follow.

Net security firm Websense reports that its security research team has discovered suspicious online scams geared to ripping off kind-hearted people attempting to donate money to the Californian fire effort.

“Unfortunately, as we saw with Katrina and several other recent emergencies, there are criminals who attempt to divert monies intended for the victims by creating bogus online donation websites and advertising them on high-traffic websites,” said Dan Hubbard, vice president of security researcher Websense. “These criminals are trying to take advantage of the amazing outpouring of support locally, state-wide and internationally. Websense is aggressively monitoring domain registrations, email honeypots, and scanning the eeb looking for these suspicious sites.”[more]

Tags: Scams