Beware of 'wrong transaction' hotel spam
If you get an e-mail message telling you a hotel has erroneously charged your credit card account, be careful. The odds are that it's part of a new spam campaign that could infect your computer.
The messages started popping up in recent days and there are already hundreds of variants on the same theme: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.
"Please see the attached form. You need to fill it out and contact your bank for return of funds," read one such message, titled "Hotel Breakers Palm Beach made wrong transaction." The 'refund' form is actually a malicious Trojan horse program that installs fake antivirus software on the victim's computer, according to Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who blogged about the spam messages Wednesday.
