FRAUD ALERT!!!
OK,
So, everyone should have a good idea of what phishing is, and if not, I’ll explain it. Phishing is where one person (or group of people) make you think that they are a legitimate enterprise, like a bank. They may ask for financial information and some will actually give it to them falling for thier trick, thus giving up their financial life. So, what is the alert about? This is an email that hit my Inbox 1:37 p.m. today. I didn’t get it until about 10:00 p.m., so it was a little dated, and the website in the email was already shut down and rendered a useless email, except as an example of what not to fall for. It has a few key features that I would like to point out.
Here’s the email, copy and pasted from my Inbox:
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Dear Customer,
While running routine checks, we have detected some unusual activity IP:[82.207.70.231-NIGERIA] in your account. For your account security we require to urgent reset your password. Protecting the security of your account and of the network is our primary concern.
ATTENTION : You must reset your account and identify your information immediately within 24h.
To start the process click next link:
www.bankofamerica-office.com
We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for your cooperation as we review this matter.
Respectfully,Support Team , Inc.
First off, read this out loud to yourself. Notice the grammatical errors in it? “we require to urgent reset your password.” What kind of sentence is that? Secondly notice the “24h.” Any legitimate place would spell out “hours.” Next is the obvious link that doesn’t work. Next thing (in the first paragraph) is the IP address that they gave. At first glance it looks OK, but if you try to ping it (a computer’s way of seeing if another computer is online), it fails. That address is invalid. Then in the closing, the “Support Team, Inc.” Who are you? Exactly. It was sent from the address “support@office.com,” clearly a fake address. I’m sorry, but if you want my financial information, you’ve got to learn how to write a fake email (I apologize if one of my readers wrote this, but you’ve got to do better than this).
Another big dead giveaway is that I don’t even have a Bank of America account. I use a bank that I’m not going to disclose online anyway. That was my first hint.
In the event of you recieving an email like this one, you should send it to the authorities either at your bank directly or the police. Phishing is a crime especially linked with Identity Theft.
Please protect yourself.