Vishing Law Effective October 1, 2008

Most citizens today have never heard of the term "vishing" or the damage it can cause a consumer. As defined in Wikipedia the term vishing means "Vishing is the criminal practice of using social engineering and Voice over IP (VoIP) to gain access to private personal and financial information from the public for the purpose of financial reward. The term is a combination of "voice" and phishing. 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. The victim is often unaware that VoIP allows for caller ID spoofing, expensive, complex automated systems and anonymity for the bill-payer. Vishing is typically used to steal credit card numbers or other information used in identity theft schemes from individuals. Vishing is very hard for legal authorities to monitor or trace. To protect themselves, consumers are advised to be highly suspicious when receiving messages directing them to call and provide credit card or bank numbers. Rather than provide any information, the consumer is advised to contact their bank or credit card company directly to verify the validity of the message. There is technology that monitors all PSTN based traffic and can identify vishing attempts as a result of patterns and anomalies in call activity. One example is a multiple calls from a limited set of skype numbers to call centers." This may cause the victim to the scam by believing the caller to be a legitimate employee of a bank, etc and giving away their personal information. The new law making this specific a crime was signed by Governor Crist and goes into affect on October 1, 2008. The law does give an exemption for law enforcement should they have a need to use this type of service in their investigations. Click here to review the new law.