Cornerstonepayday.com Revisited

Back in September of 2011, I wrote an article entitled Payday Loan Scam Site cornerstonepayday.com. In that post I took a look at the "security" behind the spam advertized site cornerstonepayday.com. I decided to revisit the site after a spam comment was posted to my blog post.

There were many issues with cornerstonepayday.com:

1. Annoying popups trying to prevent you from leaving the site.
2. Rip-off fee structure.
3. No security or encryption protecting your name, address, social security number and bank details.
4. Spam based marketing strategy
5. The stolen SSL certificate being used ion the site
6. The hard coded submission from making it impossible to submit your data securely even if you wanted to.
7. False claims on the site of using encryption to protect your data.

The site has made two major changes since the original article. The annoying popups trying to prevent you from leaving are gone and their fee structure is no longer as readily accessible. That's it. The major security problems remain.

cornerstonepayday.com's facebook page links to needcashpaydaynow.com, which has a slightly different design, but still has NO encryption, despite having the logos of several security vendors on the site. This site is a bit worse, as you get an error message when you try to load the site using HTTPS instead of HTTP. It doesn't even have a stolen security certificate for you to use in submitting your social security number.

needcashpaydaynow.com has links to a few other sites:

• holidaypayday.com
• speedypayday.ca
• eloanadvance.co.uk

These sties at least load over SSL, which is small comfort given the company they keep.

To be blunt, you'd have to be a complete idiot to trust any of these sites with your information. They're probably con artists looking to steal your identity. Even if they aren't con artists, they're incompetent when it comes to rudimentary data security. You'll probably have your identity stolen if you give them your information.