Help

Email and Computer Security

Spoof / Fake Email Example: Bank

This is typical of the email you may receive:

This particular email (or a variation of it) has also been sent claiming to be from other banks (including Nationwide, Nat West and Halifax). Halifax even closed down their online banking service for a while in October 2003 as a result of this email menace.

This is one of the most convincing scams and as they are sent out in such massive quantities the scammers only need to catch a few victims to make it pay off.

The link is a fake and takes you to a page on one of several servers where the same page is hosted, this is to make it more difficult to track them all down quickly.

The wording shown in the text of a web site address link is not necessarily the real URL of the page you would be taken to. If you had clicked on the link in the message you would be sent to the web page below.

This is quite a clever trick, the main web site you see really is the bank web site, but with a web form in a pop up window titled 'E-mail Verification' added by the hoaxers. Any information entered into the boxes in the pop-up window would sent to the hoaxer not the bank.

If you have Windows XP Service Pack 2 the text in the "title bar" of the browser window is prefixed with the real web address the page is from. In Windows Internet Explorer 7 pop-up windows will have an address bar just below the title bar that shows the real address of the web page. So in this example it would have been clear that the pop-up window was not really part of the bank web site.

If you think you entered your personal financial information into a spoof site, contact your bank / credit card company immediately.

Back to Email and Computer Security.