How thick are banks?

jimbo12345_2

Martin Lewis please publicise! There's a link on the smile.co.uk site 'important information' at the base of their homepage that says they will always include the last three letters of your post code in any emails from them. They say this is so you can be sure the email is genuine - how stupid is that? Any body who gets hold of your postcode can add three letters to an email!!! By saying this publicly they have issued an invite for phishers and scammers everywhere to use the mechanism to convince people scams and phishing emails are genuine. I just can never get over how thick this bunch of bankers are! Martin Lewis please publicise!

Gorgeous_George

Be serious, it is a perfectly adequate security measure.

You haven't thought it through.

GG

jimbo12345_2

Of course I have thought it through. It is completely inadequate. Think about it:
1: Smile say their customers can trust any email PURPORTING to come from Smile, that mentions my postcode.
2: my, your, anyone's, name, email and postcode are easy to find out.
3: It is very easy to set up a false Smile email account.
4: Unfortunately people do respond to phishing emails and will be more likely to if they are lulled into a false sense of security by the last three letters of their postcode...

The rest is easy to work out if you are a scammer or phisher. It therefore is a totally INADEQUATE security measure.

natweststaffmember

jimbo12345 wrote: »

Of course I have thought it through. It is completely inadequate. Think about it:
1: Smile say their customers can trust any email PURPORTING to come from Smile, that mentions my postcode.
2: my, your, anyone's, name, email and postcode are easy to find out.
3: It is very easy to set up a false Smile email account.
4: Unfortunately people do respond to phishing emails and will be more likely to if they are lulled into a false sense of security by the last three letters of their postcode...

The rest is easy to work out if you are a scammer or phisher. It therefore is a totally INADEQUATE security measure.

Scammers send out bulk emails and get people who are not clever enough to delete an email from a bank or will confirm their details online. If SMILE sent you an email and got the right post code are you seriously telling me that you would put your details into that??
As I said, scammers/phishers send out bulk emails so their likelihood of success is pretty low since in this day and age we are all suspicious of bank emails. Please be reasonable or if not, write to SMILE and ask them the questions and then post back the response on here. Worth the cost of a stamp, I would think.