As anyone watching the news lately knows, there are a lot of buyouts and bailouts going on. With all the mergers and financial worries going on, spammers have found a virtual paradise to play in. For the past few weeks, the amount of financial institution spam has skyrocketed. Just yesterday I received about 30 emails from supposed banks asking me to update my online information because of website redesigns or mergers. As always, you should be aware that your bank will never ask for any personal information via email. And you should never give out your social security number, credit card numbers, account numbers, etc through email to a bank or anyone else. If you receive an email that looks legitimate, don’t click on the links in the email, but rather type the bank’s website into Internet Explorer yourself to make sure you are at the correct website. The last thing anyone would want to deal with in this financial climate is having their identity stolen.
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October 21, 2008 at 12:52 am
mdfabs
As always, good advice Mark! Do you have any good resources for information you could link to for this blog entry? Any samples of what to look for in a phishing?
October 29, 2008 at 9:09 am
Marc
Thank you. For more information, you can go to http://www.mdpsystems.com/links/links.html and follow the 2 links about email scams and phishing; and check out our newsletter from May 1 here: http://www.mdpsystems.com/newsletter/newsletter.html. As for what to look for, emails that look like they are from banks asking you to update your account information or to follow a security update on the website are the most common phishing scams right now. The giveaway is usually the horrible grammar and/or spelling. Just remember that banks will NEVER ask for your personal information or account numbers via email.