Here’s the latest banking scam spam to grace my inbox. I don’t share stuff that my spam filter catches, only the ones that make it through. This one is supposedly from U.S. Bank. That was the first giveaway – I don’t have an account with them. But even if you get an e-mail from a bank or company you know, never just click a link to go to them. Type in the address by hand. Or, at the very least, if you click, look to see if you’ve been taken to the site you want to go to. If it is something other than the bank’s web site, or eBay’s, or whoever’s, then it is a fraud to get your information (commonly known as ‘phishing’). In this case, another giveaway was that the e-mail address the message came from wasn’t something@thecorrectaddress.com. If you get something claiming to be from eBay, for instance, and the address it was sent from isn’t ________@ebay.com then you know something is wrong.
Play it safe. Don’t believe any e-mail asking for your password, telling you you have a message, asking you to update your account, or anything of that sort.
Here’s the text of the e-mail:
Internet Banking
We’d like to inform you that your Message Center has 1 new message.
Please login to your Internet Banking and visit the Message Center section in order to read the message.
Login to Internet Banking.
(The Message Center contains only important information about your account and online banking.)
Please do not reply to this e-mail. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. To receive email notifications in plain text instead of HTML, update your preferences.
© 2007 U.S. Bancorp
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