Faithful readers will recall a Trojan that had a pay-by-phone extortion scheme.
The payment processor sent me this yesterday:
I have just found your blog entry about our company being involved in pay-by-phone extortion.
I can say that this is clearly against any terms we have with our merchants that use our convenient phone billing option for accepting online payments.
We where not aware of these issues as described in your blog nor did we receive complaints about this from customers using our payment service.
I guess they thought this was pretty pointless.
I wish we would have caught this sooner, we have instantly blocked any visitors directed to our payment platform from this merchant, furthermore we have requested the online payment services that was used to pay this merchant to block his accounts, furthermore we are looking into what legal procedures that we can follow from his actions although that is a very difficult path to follow.
I have attached a screen shot from the merchant site showing his account is terminate in case we have been replaced already if you go back to check.
As you may understand this blog entry you have on your website is very damaging toward our company, our goal is to provide a convenient method of paying for all the people that do not have a credit card, but wish to be able to shop online as well, would there be any chances you can either update or remove your blog entry with the latest details I just provided you?
If you have any questions I will be happy to answer them all.
Best Regards,
Pin 2 Enter
It appears that the payment processor is correct, and that the payment scheme is no longer in effect. However, if any security researchers out there see otherwise, let me know. We were seeing the payment scheme off the site backdoor-guard com.
Alex Eckelberry