Don't be caught - Phishing Discussion

trisontana

I received another phishing email, supposedly from the Nationwide. The people who produced this one are really stupid in the way they have tried to copy a genuine page. At the top of this page it asks for your customer number, memorable phrase and pass number, but further down is the genuine statement from Nationwide which states:-

" Nationwide will never ask you for your memorable data or pass number in an e-mail. Never disclose this information to anyone."

steve6375

OK - I consider myself fairly savvy and work in the IT sector, but I think I fell for a phishing scam. In my email in-tray was an email from 'play.com'. It was announcing a special offer (something like free downloads for a month for $15). I clicked on the link and was taken to a website that looked like Play.com as far as I could tell. The offer looked good and so I gaily entered my address and credit card details - I then had second thoughts and did not actually sign up for the offer by not completing the last confirming page.

A few days later my bank contacted about fraudulent transactions on my credit card for that same afternoon! The first transactions were £0.01 for play.com closely followed by a larger debit and then by several others including a £2,500 debit for American Express.

Moral of the story is NEVER click on any link in any email and whenever you put in any details of bank or credit cards, always think 'how do I know this site is genuine?'

Ask yourself this question - would you have fallen for this?

Steve

fergal_2

This is my first post and would appreciate any comments/advice on the following incident of a couple of days ago. I applied for a Sainsbury's Internet Savings Account and duly filled in all the required details including user name, password, secret questions etc., when a popup appeared. This said: Security Alert. You are about to be redirected to a connection that is not secure. The information that you are sending to the current site might be transmitted to a non secure site. Do you wish to continue? Naturally, I didn't continue. I called the bank in question who stated the popup wasn't part of their site and advised me against continuing. Has anyone any idea what this popup was about? I have McAfee anti virus software etc., but am fairly new to this sort of thing.
Thanks,
Fergal

trisontana

I received this gem today:-

"Dear Customers!

In connection with hard increase of fraud level for the first month
of this year The Co-operative Bank p.l.c. takes operative actions on
struggle with fraud and to increase the safety of our clients. Bank has
entered new measures of protection of your accounts which will as
much as possible exclude an opportunity of fulfilment of illegitimate transactions.

For activation of changes we ask you to proceed under the link
below and log on to your online account.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In case of failure to meet requirements of bank within 48 hours,
your account will be temporarily suspended in order to prevent unsafe transactions.

Sincerely yours.
The Co-operative Bank p.l.c. Security Department. "

Do they think anyone would be fooled by this? The English is so poor that only an idiot would respond to this email.

soolin

trisontana wrote:

Do they think anyone would be fooled by this? The English is so poor that only an idiot would respond to this email.

I agree, but yet respond they do.

A Which survey a couple of years ago found a worryingly high percentage of people who assumed that 'anything' from a bank or institution must be real and would supply all information requested without a second thought.

Soo

madauri

We get so many scam e-mails that in the end it's fairly easy to see through them. But sometimes there is doubt. You may have purchased something through e-bay recently and then a message comes and you don't know what to do.
What I do then is look at the bottom line of the window while I put the mouse arrow on the suspect link. It usually shows very cleary that it's a scam, since the address is not what it should be. If it still looks unclear, I still do not click; I send an e-mail (direct; not using the message I'm looking at) to the relevant people (e.g. the paypal security fellows) with a copy of the message. They answer very soon confirming it's a scam. Plus they can use the info you send to locate the origin.

downie_2

The line at the bottom left of your browser window, called the status bar, can be overwritten by scripts. You can stop this in Mozilla/Firefox browsers by going into Options/Content/EnableJavaScript/Advanced and uncheckiing the 'hide status bar' and 'change status bar text' boxes.
This also stops those annoying scrolling messages.;)

downie_2

There's a big ebay.com phishing operation on at the moment, which may not affect you in the UK, but if you get any it would be helpful if you could forward the source code to me.
Apropo what someone posted about trying out phishing sites, be aware that if the link is customised in some way e.g https://www.signin.ebay.com.ebayline.com?ru=456773
you may be confirming the existence of your email address if you visit the site.
I haven't seen one yet, but there are predictions of phishing sites that will interrogate your browsing history to see which banks, shopping sites etc you have used, in order to target you specifically with the right fakes.
Best to clear your browser history before visiting a suspected phishing site.
Technical details at
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/markus/papers/invasivesniff05.pdf
(quite heavy going).
GD

trisontana

I have received yet another phishing email today. You can tell from the hisgh standard of English that it's genuine ! :-

"Dear Customer

In connection with hard increase of fraud level for the last month The Co-operative Bank p.l.c. takes preventive actions on struggle with fraud and to increase the safety of our clients. Bank is implementing new measures of protection of your accounts which will exclude an opportunity of fulfilment of illegitimate transactions.

For activation of changes we ask you to proceed under the link below and log on to your bank account.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In case of failure to meet requirements of bank within 48 hours, your account will be temporarily suspended in order to prevent unsafe transactions.

Best wishes


Russ Brady
Head of communications
The Co-operative Bank p.l.c."

Who do they think they are trying to fool ?

doingwhatican

I had a couple in the last couple of days. one email trying to pretend to be paypal anti fraud - that made me laugh and another one pretending to be a ask the seller a question email. They had even gone to the trouble of using an item descripion and item number of what I was selling. I put the mouse curser over the respond now link and it had a very long non ebay link. I copied and pasted the link and removed my account name and email address then clicked on it and it took me to a very good copy of the ebay logon screen, where I proceeded to put in lots of very funny usernames and password, I only did this for a few minutes as I soon got bored of it. I can imagine people getting caught out by this. On closer inspection you could see the mistakes that they had made in trying to copy the ebay email and logon screen.