phishing

What? my server gets about 50 a day, and has done consistently for months. It's nothing to do with a new campaign, simply that your email address has just been got...

Jim.

If I don't get getting on for a dozen of these a day, there's something wrong with the mail system. I've never, as far as I'm aware, had a phishing attempt related to any bank I actually use.

I'm not sure you're right. I've been receiving bank phishing emails for quite a while (most turned away by my mail server); I've in the past few days started getting them from "ebay" and "paypal" via "real" mail servers rather than zombie bots. One of the paypal ones had me going for a few moments - the sending relay was named as something like paypal4231.com, but the reverse address lookup gave a far-eastern isp.

But this isn't really a uk.finance issue, I think :-)

I rarely get them, and in the early days, one from LTSB nearly fooled me, but looking at the html message in txt format revealed the bogus links.

Tiddy Ogg.

I really dont understand the problem of Phishing emails. Simple rule is dont open links and go to your banks website yourself via the website you know.

It is the same for phone calls. Always contact them yourself on a number you know is genuine.

Common sense and problem solved.

Why do people have such problems?!

The vast majority of people don't have a problem of course. It costs virtually nothing to send bucket loads of emails, it only takes a tiny minority of people to fall for the scam to make it hugely profitable, maybe one in ten thousand.

Given that some people are conned into believing that they've won a foreign lottery that they never bought a ticket for, or that a box full of black paper is really a box full of cancelled 10 pound notes, it's not that surprising that a tiny minority will think that their bank really does require them to reconfirm their account details after a software upgrade.

Anyway, AIUI the phishing victims aren't the real victims of this scam - they usually get their money back. It's the people who fall for the sister scam, the "payment processors" who take the transferred money and forward it to the scammers by some untraceable method.

my yahoo 'catchall' email account is full of these, along with various people in Nigeria offering me lots of money.

More likely, bad luck, her email addy has gotten onto a spam list :-(

Check out following article on how to avoid phishing?

How to report phishing to Anti phishing working group.

Sumukh

I get loads of phishes for Barclays, about the only bank I don't have an account with.

Apparently the response rate for most scams is about one in ten million. But most emails - about 90% of those sent out, aren't to valid email addresses.

That is true, and most people don't seem to realise that.

Donno.

Hint: You /can/ do online banking, pensions & ISA admin *without* ever telling the counterparty your email address.

Shame so many numpties running webshops think that's not the case and expect you to set up username/password 'accounts' with them.

rgds, Alan

Update. I reported the LTSB scam and the web site was closed down within 30 minutes.

Brian

I've never seen this one.

do you have a link?

tim

He is probably thinking of something like this:

"One aspect of the Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud involves victims being informed of the existence of case loads of banknotes which are said to have been coated or stamped in order to disguise their identity from the authorities or for "security purposes".

This may even come as a surprise to the victim who, after paying untold fees to have the money finally released, discover it now needs to be cleaned by chemical dye removers before it is useable. Such a process is accompanied with, of course, yet more fees or expenses....."

Saw it on telly the other week.

They said it was an common scam at car boot sales. The conmen spray loads of bits of paper black. They then spin a spiel about these being cancelled Bank of England notes, the BOE spray them with black paint before sending them off to be burnt. But a load fell of the back of a lorry. They have a device which can remove the paint revealing a crisp tenner (the device obviously being some kind of magicians prop), which they demo. They are offering boxes of the paper and the device for sale for something like thirty quid.

The programme makers set up a stall at a car boot sale and managed to sell quite a few of boxes of worthless bits of paper! (They gave all the losers their money back afterwards of course).

It was on this programme:

obviously not common enough that they could film it for real, and instead had to do it themselves :-)

Tumbleweed wrote: ...

I heard the idea of the programme was to show how fundamentally dishonest a lot of the general public are, rather than how easily conned. But maybe the two are related :-)

Bitstring , from the wonderful person Mike Scott said

Sure they are, everyone knows it's extremely hard to con an honest person .. although it seems pretty easy to phish one.

Not at all. It was on again last night - the cons were simply outright cons which don't require any dishonesty on the part of the victim.

For instance the cons featured last night were:

A man dressed as a car park inspector with an ID he made on his computer puts an "out of order" sign on the car park ticket machine and stands by the machine, taking people's money and giving them a receipt from a receipt book.

A woman on a high street holds a box with bits on glass in it, and engineers bumps with people walking past. Spins a story about it being an expensive vase, and some people pay her compensation.

A motorcycle courier goes to the reception of a company and states he has a package for so-and-so. The receptionist says so-and-so doesn't work there. He gets his mobile out but the battery is dead - he then asks to use the receptionist's phone to phone his office. Then tries to stay on the phone as long as possible - he's actually phonng his own premium rate phone number.