Applied for a credit card, received suspicious email days later

remondo

I applied for my first credit card online some time last week with Capital One in an attempt to improve my credit rating. Today I received an email from 'experian' whom I had an account with a few months ago using a different email address to the one I received the suspicious email on. I receive little to no spam on this (work) email account, other than some recent 'Corporate eFax message' emails with a similar zip file attached containing an exe file. My boss's email address was included in the recipient field, it's very strange that only 2 specific email addresses received this same email, almost as if this is a direct attack attempt.

The email in question looks totally genuine, but me being tech savvy and working with computers as a career, I sensed something was up. The sender is displayed as 'Experian [credit.report@experian.com]'. The email reads in large type 'A Key Change Has Been Posted to One of Your Credit Reports', I immediately thought it was to do with my recent credit card application so I read the perfectly worded and genuine looking text copy and proceeded to open the attachment, a zip file containing an exe file- definitely suspicious. At the top of the email the small print suggests adding a certain email address, different to the one the email was supposedly sent from, to the safe senders list. Googling the domain in the email address returns a result for a russian site, need I say more?!

Sorry if this is totally the wrong place to post this but I didn't know who to ask! I'd like to know if anyone else has experienced something similar to this after applying for a credit card or whether it's total coincidence? I'd also like to know how I report the offender? I understand there are billions of spam emails like this every day, but these are pretty exceptional circumstances. There is no doubt in my mind that people are falling for this. I suspect this exe is a keylogger distributed with the intention to steal user information. I'm currently scanning my system with various programs including malware bytes to see if anything is amiss- nothing so far.

Any input is appreciated!

_Andy_

Can't help with most of it but yep co-incidence. Possible your/boss's email are public on company website perhaps?

cooltt

You may very well have a key logger installed and they are very difficult to detect.
Use more than one detection tool such as spybot search and destroy & pc doctor. You can report it as spam to your system administrator.

eddddy

Hi Remondo

If you google "A Key Change Has Been Posted to One of Your Credit Reports" you will see that this is a widely reported phishing email scam. (And it's almost certainly unrelated to your cc application.)

I believe that you can forward these types of emails to a special email address at Action Fraud, see:
https://reportlite.actionfraud.police.uk/

In this case, you could also report it to Experian. If they wished, they could then warn their customers.

By now, email providers (and spamblock providers) will probably have become aware of this particular spam email, so they will start rerouting it to spam folders and/or deleting the attachment, etc.

sfax

Most corporate mail servers would be setup to stop any zipped exe attachment ever reaching your inbox in the first place, even gmail doesn't accept them as attachments. Have a word with your system administrator