Spam Emails (Phishing for Data)

I know I keep going on about spam emails and how to recognise the nonsense that abounds but I thought it was time to reinforce this with an example which is going around. I'll explain some ways to spot that it's a fake and reveal something that helps to protect you!

This particular email is titled "Unable to send your reward cheque" and contains the following text...

Dear Nationwide Online customer,

The bank congratulates you as a devouted customer and rewards you with a shopping cheque of 500 pounds, but

We were unable to send your reward cheque due to a possible error your home address information.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

- A recent change in your personal information .
- Submitting invalid information during the initial sign up process.

Consequently, we placed a temporary restriction on your account. We did this to protect your account from any fraudulent activity.

Please verify your information :

https://www.nationwide.co.uk

Thank you,

Nationwide Customer Service

It's probably immediately obvious that it's a fake, even if I were a Nationwide customer!

However, let's look a some of the phrasing...

"...congratulates you as a devouted customer...", so what's this devouted?? devoted or devout, perhaps, but real emails would be checked fo such things (not that Nationwide would ever send such an email anyway!)

"...due to a possible error in your home address information..." - how do they know it's wrong? If I were a customer of theirs then they'd certainly have correct address information, so this is a load of twaddle!

"...due to ...reasons... change in your personal information" - again, how do they know?,

"...invalid... during...sign up" - OK, if they can tell it was invalid, why was it allowed during sign-up. Just doesn't make sense.

Then comes the total nonsense; "...placed a temporary restriction on your account. We did this to protect your account from any fraudulent activity...". But hold on, this is TOTALLY wrong.

1. None of the reasons quoted included that someone had got into the account, so there's no need to worry about fraudulent activity
2. They were worrying because they couldn't send me 500 squids because my address was wrong - so now they're suspending my account?
3. Would they really do this to a "devouted" customer; suspend the account just because they couldn't send you £500

Anyway, if they wanted to give you £500, why not just credit the account? After all, they'd hope that you pay in any cheque that they sent you!

The biggest clue of all comes when you hover over (don't click on it!) the link https://www.nationwide.co.uk and note in the status area that it actually shows http://74.164.186.235/~test/nnn.html, showing the link to be a total fake.

So what about protection?

Well, if you're using Thunderbird as your email client (and if you're using Outlook Express, then it's time to change!), the first thing is that it displays "Thunderbird thinks that this message might be an email scam"
.

The next thing is that if you DO click on that silly link it pops up the message, "Thunderbird thinks this site is suspicious....."