Striptease is scammers’ trick

A buxom, beautiful blond who promises to remove her slinky scraps of lingerie is the creation of online scammers. She’s trying to trick unsuspecting Internet users into helping the scammers break the online barriers that banks and e-mail services set up to thwart crooks.

The striptease is the latest attempt to defeat so-called CAPTCHA systems, short for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Those safeguards require users to prove they are human by reading wavy, oddly shaped jumbles of letters and numbers that appear in an image and typing them out.

In the new scam, an icon of an alluring woman appears on a Windows computer infected by a virus. After clicking on the icon, the user sees a photo of an attractive woman who vows to take off an article of clothing each time the jumble of figures next to her is entered.

Paul Ferguson, network architect at computer security firm Trend Micro Inc., said scammers might be using the results to write a program to bypass CAPTCHA systems.