Spam email??

BREX

Hi

dont know if this is the right place to post this but I have just checked my emails and have one from abbey national asking me to verify my bank details...the thing is I have never banked with abbey...
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what this is and what I should do about it?

queensway_boy

Don't even open the email,just delete it and the same with every email you get like this as you might get a few now with different banks,its a phishing scam:mad: If your on hotmail there's a tab at the top to "report phishing" click that

lavendergirl

Spam definitely, but watch out for spam e-mails purporting to be from ALL the banks, my OH gets loads of different ones, from different banks none of which we have had accounts with

BREX

Thanks for your prompt replies:T ..will delete immediately. I am on outlook express so cannot report phishing.

Woby_Tide

Think about it logically, you've had an unsolicited email from a company that you have no realtionship with, asking you to provide them personal details for a bank account you don't have with them


Pretend this forum didn't exist so you couldn't have asked the question. But what do you think you should have done in the same circumstances? Can you find any rational logic for either believeing the mail to be genuine and acting on it? What would possibly be the entirely wrong thing to do in the circumstances.

ryandj

Best practice when receiving emails is not to click on links in them ever, even if you think they may be genuine.

If you get an email asking you to log into your bank, ebay, paypal, or other account don't click on the link in the email. It may be genuine, but in many cases its fake - there are many tricks now and many of the emails look pretty convincing, even though they come from fake addresses.

Instead of clicking on the links, navigate to the normal log in page through your internet browser.

I myself have fallen for a fake email purporting to be from ebay - I clicked on the link and entered my password before noticing that the web address was not actually ebay, but some other site.

Needless to say, I closed the window down straight away, checked for viruses and then logged into ebay from a new window at the right address, changed my password and then kept an eye on the account for a while.

If you think you may have inadvertently given away your password details in this way then make sure you call your bank or whatever and tell them!!

Badger_Lady

Most banks also do their own investigation and have a special email address you can forward these to, e.g. [EMAIL="spoof@egg.com"]spoof@egg.com[/EMAIL].

I always try to do this, to help prevent other people falling for them. unfortunately, I can't seem to find an email address for Abbey for you to use - sorry :-(

geordie_joe

One thing you can do, which I do is to get the banks etc. to only send you text emails. Most have an option for this.

Spam emails only work if they are HTML, by setting the text only emails option with your bank/ebay/paypal etc. you can tell at a glance if the email is phishing.

I also have filters set up to put ebay emails in the ebay folder, bank emails in the bank folder etc. Only genuine ones go into the folders and the phishing ones just stay in the in box.

greenstreetprince

Badger_Lady wrote: »

I always try to do this, to help prevent
other people falling for them. unfortunately, I can't seem to find an
email address for Abbey for you to use - sorry :-(

internetsecurity@abbey.com

no harm in opening and reading these emals, opening emails cannot
cause any damage, only opening attachments or clicking the links
within can do that.

often its a good idea to read these and have a chuckle at how poor the
spammers english is!

LittleVoice

greenstreetprince wrote: »

no harm in opening and reading these emals, opening emails cannot cause any damage, only opening attachments or clicking the links within can do that.

With html messages, if you have not set your email security not to download automatically from links, then I think you may get problems - at least by proving that your email address works.

Mikeyorks

There's a new collective site underwritten by APACS and which you can forward Bank orientated phishing Emails onto. Personally feel it may get more atttention there - and saves looking up the contact details for all the individual Banks (you normally don't have an account with!) - who, as ever, have no standardisation in this area.

http://www.banksafeonline.org.uk/report_scam.html