Tag: Promised

Chinese world-wide-web firm Sohu’s personnel duped by e-mail fraud that promised ‘allowances’ to these who present their banking info

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Chinese world-wide-web portal operator Sohu.com said on Wednesday that two dozen staff misplaced much more than 40,000 yuan (US$6,000) following they fell victim to an e mail rip-off, which promised “allowances” to recipients who provide their financial institution accounts and other personalized identification facts.

The 24 workers believed the e-mail was authentic due to the fact it was despatched from an undisclosed Sohu employee’s account, which was afterwards uncovered to have been hacked and applied to ship mail purportedly from the firm’s company finance division, in accordance to a statement posted by Sohu on microblogging platform Weibo.

The email sent on Could 18 had the issue “See on the wage allowance for May possibly”, according to a report on Wednesday by The Beijing News, a Chinese Communist Social gathering-owned newspaper. Some of the duped workers lost their discounts after furnishing their banking information, the report reported.

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That Sohu e-mail account was compromised immediately after an employee’s password was leaked in an accidental phishing incident, according to Beijing-dependent Sohu. It claimed the circumstance has been noted to the law enforcement for additional investigation.

Sohu.com founder Charles Zhang Chaoyang attends an internet conference in Beijing on August 28, 2014. Photo: Shutterstock alt=Sohu.com founder Charles Zhang Chaoyang attends an internet meeting in Beijing on August 28, 2014. Photograph: Shutterstock

Sohu founder, chairman and main executive Charles Zhang Chaoyang mentioned in a post on Weibo that the incident “just isn’t as serious as people believe”. He indicated that measures taken by the firm’s technologies division stored the whole financial reduction to beneath 50,000 yuan.

In addition, he explained the incident did not have an effect on the email providers of all Sohu consumers.

Whilst online scams are not uncommon in China, cybersecurity breaches in important hi-tech companies have turn into rare. As these types of, Sohu’s status has taken a strike on Chinese social media.

The e mail rip-off at Sohu on Wednesday was trending on top rated of the research checklist of Weibo, which is affiliated with Sohu’s competitor Sina.com.

One Weibo consumer posted a comment that it was a disgrace for Sohu, at the time known as a single of China’s major web portals, to turn out to be prey for ripoffs and phishing actions. Other Weibo buyers mentioned the reported money reduction reflected how destitute Sohu staff have grow to be.

Sohu, just one of the initial Chinese tech corporations to record on Nasdaq in 2000, last month reported it is wanting to exit the US trade, signalling that the enterprise is not self-confident about meeting rigorous auditing needs.

The firm’s announcement arrived following the US Securities and Trade Fee added 12 extra Chinese providers, which includes Sohu, to a list of stocks

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Facebook Promised Poor Countries Free Internet. People Got Charged Anyway.

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Facebook says it’s helping millions of the world’s poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use internet data free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month.

To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges. Many of the users have inexpensive cellphone plans that cost just a few dollars a month, often prepaid, for phone service and a small amount of internet data.

Because of software problems at Facebook, which it has known about and failed to correct for months, people using the apps in free mode are getting unexpectedly charged by local cellular carriers for using data. In many cases they only discover this when their prepaid plans are drained of funds.

In internal documents, employees of Facebook parent

Meta Platforms Inc.


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acknowledge this is a problem. Charging people for services Facebook says are free “breaches our transparency principle,” an employee wrote in an October memo.

In the year ended July 2021, charges made by the cellular carriers to users of Facebook’s free-data products grew to an estimated total of $7.8 million a month, when purchasing power adjustments were made, from about $1.3 million a year earlier, according to a Facebook document.

Mir Zaman, right, who owns a convenience store in Muzaffarabad, transfers mobile data to customer Sheikh Imran.



Photo:

Saiyna Bashir for The Wall Street Journal

The documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal were written in the fall of 2021 and are not part of the information made public by whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager.

Facebook calls the problem “leakage,” since paid services are leaking into the free apps and services. It defines leakage in internal documents as, “When users are in Free Mode and believe that the data they are using is being covered by their carrier networks, even though these users are actually paying for the data themselves.”

A Meta spokesman said Facebook has received reports from users about data leakage and has investigated them. “We’ve continued work trying to resolve the issue we’ve identified.” He said the company has mitigated most of the problem and that work continues. The spokesman said new versions of free mode are labeled “text only” and don’t prominently display the words “Free mode,” although previous versions still in use continue to do so. He said the company is working on updates.

The spokesman said free-mode users are notified when they sign up that videos aren’t free. They are supposed to get a notification that they will be charged if they click on a video, but it doesn’t always work. He said Facebook is working to fix that.

The spokesman said the estimate of the additional monthly data charges isn’t based

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