Slightly off-topic: Bank account phishing scam

[mohapi]

I know this probably doesn't belong in this area, but I wanted to pass this information along to as many folks as possible ... even if it is somewhat unrelated to Ubuntu in general.

I work at a small-town newspaper, and last night, in the space of 20 minutes, I got four badly written e-mails asking me to update my account information at Wells Fargo bank.

I am not a Wells Fargo bank customer. I have never been a Wells Fargo bank customer.

By viewing the source code of the e-mail, I found a link to www.a7sa.com, and if you move directly to the subdirectory www.a7sa.com/im, you can see that this person has set up phony pages for Wells Fargo and Bank of America, in hopes of phishing bank account information. Personally, I prefer to surf that site anonymously (http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html), unless I'm behind the corporate servers at the office.

If you didn't know any better, or you were accustomed to receiving e-mails from either of those banks, you might be duped into entering all your bank account info, your name, address, phone numbers, etc. You can imagine the effect that might have.

I've archived that site on our newspaper's network, so we have an image of it if a reporter wants to do a story about it (newspapers love electronic fraud stories). I also contacted Wells Fargo through their standard "Report suspicious e-mails" link, but I have yet to hear back from them.

All the same, I thought I ought to at least mention that experience here, and give others the chance to see how those phishing schemes work. Those pages are interesting to look at, to say the least.

Cheers, and be safe.

P.S.: For fun, try entering that site address at www.dnsstuff.com. You get all kinds of interesting information there. :cool:

[mstlyevil]

I know this probably doesn't belong in this area, but I wanted to pass this information along to as many folks as possible ... even if it is somewhat unrelated to Ubuntu in general.

I work at a small-town newspaper, and last night, in the space of 20 minutes, I got four badly written e-mails asking me to update my account information at Wells Fargo bank.

I am not a Wells Fargo bank customer. I have never been a Wells Fargo bank customer.

By viewing the source code of the e-mail, I found a link to www.a7sa.com, and if you move directly to the subdirectory www.a7sa.com/im, you can see that this person has set up phony pages for Wells Fargo and Bank of America, in hopes of phishing bank account information. Personally, I prefer to surf that site anonymously (http://www.the-cloak.com/login.html), unless I'm behind the corporate servers at the office.

If you didn't know any better, or you were accustomed to receiving e-mails from either of those banks, you might be duped into entering all your bank account info, your name, address, phone numbers, etc. You can imagine the effect that might have.

I've archived that site on our newspaper's network, so we have an image of it if a reporter wants to do a story about it (newspapers love electronic fraud stories). I also contacted Wells Fargo through their standard "Report suspicious e-mails" link, but I have yet to hear back from them.

All the same, I thought I ought to at least mention that experience here, and give others the chance to see how those phishing schemes work. Those pages are interesting to look at, to say the least.

Cheers, and be safe.

P.S.: For fun, try entering that site address at www.dnsstuff.com. You get all kinds of interesting information there. :cool:

I got one from a phishing site claiming they were E-Bay. The problem is that I do not have or ever will have an E-Bay account.

[majikstreet]

My mom and grandmother have both gotten phishing emails regularly. Luckly, they both realized that it was not real. First thing, their emails seem to have black text, with gibberishish crap written in gray in between lines....

I've explained it to them and they know not to listen to the emails.

majikstreet

[Mr_Grieves]

I got phishing attempts for Amazon. They tricked Evolution to show the URL llike "amazon.com", but when you clicked on it.. you went to a regular IP-address, on some webhotel in Asia. Anyway.. I know outlook could be fooled to do that.. but Evolution.. :(

[Master Shake]

One thing I like about Gmail, accessed via the web portal, is that it automatically disables all links on suspected phishing emails.