e-mail scam targeting Barclays customers

Just for laughs I've answered this one and will see how long I can string them out for. I believe the advice (not to answer these) is wrong. If only 1 out of 100 recipients answered and strung them along for a while, they'd never be able to sort out the real chumps from the millions of replies they'd get. They'd probably never be able to even sort through their inboxes.

how did they get the e-mail addresses in the first place

The same way all the spammers do ... I recently signed up with NTL and hence I now have an NTL email address, which I have so far used for exactly nothing, but I've still had about a dozen junk mails sent to it, several of them carrying viruses. Probably someone is just generating addresses at random to see if they work.

But is the link to a barclays *domain* ? If it was some unknown domain (ie not barclays.co.uk/barclaycard.co.uk etc) then it would be an obvious scam surely!

Good point - I'll do the same from now on !

Daytona

And as the creaters know, some people will still respond.....

It might not be obvious to stupid people, which is the target market.

A sort of tax on gullability!

In article , Adrian Boliston writes

The link looks legitimate but if you open the message in a text editor it reveals a long gap and a redirection to a US address. I caught because I'm not a Barclays account holder, so I dug a little deeper.

Presumably the site has been pulled by the ISP by now?

In article , Adrian Boliston writes

Probably not a good idea for me to paste it here. Let's just say the one I got is hosted by Affinity Internet in California

Presumably. I have no intention of clicking it and finding out.

It's possible they might sell them to some real organisations, but I doubt they would sell them to random spammers. Of course, someone inside the organisation might grab the address list, but I doubt that would explain getting spam within a few days of the account being created. Also the amount doesn't seem to be increasing, so the address doesn't seem to be on the main spam lists, unlike my egg account which gets 10-20 mails a day.

I think my security settings are adequate, thank. I also think that connecting to anything that has been proven a security risk is not just dangerous but downright stupid.

I turn off all scripting, Active X and Javascript and require prompts even for secure sites. My network is behind a hardware firewall and my desktop runs its own software firewall, spam blocker and Trojan monitor.

And I still think it is not worth contacting a proven security risk.

If Barclays don't make good the loss - yes. But I have a horrible feeling that they will, leading to a cost on the business which will become a cost on the customers.

Would any Barclays customer like to contact Barclays about this and let us know ?

Daytona