Dear Colleagues,
I just thought that I would pass on a warning of a practice that I'm
sure many of you are aware of, but that has just taken up a lot of my
time investigating, so hopefully by passing this on I can help save
other people's time! Please pass this on to the relevant person at
your institution if you don't happen to be responsible for overseeing
your online transaction/conference booking facility.
Like many Universities I'm sure, we have a web-based credit card
booking facility for conferences, which has been trouble-free for a
long time. Earlier this week we received 6 attempted bookings for
places at a particular conference, 4 of which were made using credit
card details that were rejected by the system, but 2 of which were
successful. The same happened again in the early hours of this
morning with another conference that we're running, in this case two
attempts that were both unsuccessful due to the card details being
rejected.
In all the cases the delegate details give Nigerian addresses, but
in most the card holder details give addresses in the USA.
The two successful booking transactions have since been followed up
by four emails and two (aggressive) telephone calls requesting that
"letters of invitation" be faxed to a particular number in Nigeria to
enable the delegates to obtain visas to enter the UK.
After much investigation via Police and other web site, I finally
tracked down a very helpful man in the Ukvisas section of the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office who explained that this is a fairly common
method that is used in Nigeria to fraudulently obtain visas to enter
the UK. Most helpfully, he gave me an email address to which I can
send all the relevant data to enable the matter to be investigated.
So, should you find that you have received similar suspicious bookings,
followed up by aggressive requests for letters of invitation, the
email address to send all the details to is [log in to unmask]
Best wishes,
Adrian
Adrian Tribe
Web Manager
Central Computing Services
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London
WC1E 7HX
T: 020 7631 6291
F: 020 7631 6556
E: [log in to unmask]
|