If you’ve ever been the victim of “phishing” — or even attempted “phishing” — you might be interested in an article on the topic in the Wall Street Journal.
Phishing is basically sending an email purporting to be someone you are not, attempting to extract personal information about the person to try to drain their bank account via Western Union money transfers or ATM withdrawals. I’ve covered a unique form of phishing particular to eBay scammers earlier.
The overriding message? Don’t ever give out information to someone who solicits it from you. Only give it at times, places, and to people that you have made a free choice to contact and divulge this information.
What’s really interesting to me is that the parts of phishing, such as designing web sites to mirror banking sites, creating the emails, making the fake ATM cards, trading account information, and managing user databases of phished accounts are all, themselves, full-time jobs.
Citibank Phishing
A coworker showed me and email a few weeks back from what was supposed to be “Citibank” It read: *official Citibank logo*
“Dear CitiBank customer, Recently there have been a large number of identity theft attempts targeting CitiBank customers. In order to safeguard your account, we require that you confirm your banking details. This process is mandatory, and if not completed within the nearest time your account may be subject to tempory suspension To securly confirm your Citibank account details please go to…. ”
And there was a link that looked like it pointed to a secure citibank website. Upon clicking on the link it even looked like a Citibank website The two problems were 1) if you looked at the properties of the link it wasnt an actual citibank site and 2)my coworker didnt have a citibank account.
The person that sent it out must have spent alot of time working on it. I feel sorry for the people that actually had Citibank accounts and may have fallen for it. — Bryan