Phishing scams are rampant on the Internet. PayPal, Bank of America, eBay, and other large online finanacial services have been struggling with these types of scams for some time. It was only a matter of time before it was attemtped with ePassporte.
Most of us in this industry are aware of the tactics and savvy enough to recognize them when we see them. The number one red flag in the case of this particular scam was that the URL was incorrect and insecure. The domains used were "http://www.epasscheck.net" and "http://www.epasscheck..com. Please note, all ePassporte sites are secure with https.
One should never follow a link to a financial site, but instead, manually type the domain name into the browswer make sure it is correct, and log-in.
A good definition of phishing can be found at
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/phishing.html
ePassporte worked with the ISP's hosting the bogus websites to have them disabled within minutes after we were notified.. All known phishing sites are no longer working.
We encourage anyone who receives a questionable email to forward it to
[email protected].