Whew! The Phishermen are out in force today
There are always a few – but today was like being on Pend Oreille Lake the first morning of the Fall Fishing Derby! But instead of boat-to-boat it was email-to-email.
Generally I just delete each of them without looking, but tonight I scrolled down and scanned one of those messages. Those identity thieves are really bold! They were asking for everything, including the 3 digits on the back of my credit card. That particular message told me that because of suspicious activity, they had locked my account until they heard from me.
I don’t know what the penalty for identity theft is, but I would guess it is considered a serious crime – so the potential rewards of this nasty scam must be very high. And, here’s the sad part, they must get enough response from those bogus emails to make it worth the risk.
If you have people in your address book who might not be aware of phishing – and who might possibly respond to one of these messages – I hope you’ll take a few minutes to warn them.
The way some of the messages are written, a person could panic and respond if they didn’t know better.
One of them I received today was a dire warning that I needed to contact them immediately because my account had been compromised.
By the way, if you want to help stop the phishing, forward those emails to the FTC at spam@uce.gov
Here’s to honest prosperity!
Marte
Posted: November 6th, 2008 under e-mail, fraud.
Tags: email messages, phishing, scam alerts