Saturday 24 March 2007
The Account Confirmation Scam is also known as phishing scam. The principles of this scam are very simple. Nevertheless people fall for it everyday and can lose a lot of money in it.
How an Account Confirmation Scam works
The victim receives notification by email from a bank or PayPal. The victim is informed that for various reasons, he needs to verify that this email address belongs to the holder of the account, so he needs to click on a confirmation link, which is provided within the e-mail, and log in to his account.
The email looks legitimate, it appears to be sent from company’s email address and has the right logos.
So the victim clicks on the link, and logs in to his account. What he will do next is not important, because he just gave his account details to the scammers. And they will study his accounts, and find credit cards etc. They also will clear out his account from any money he has.
The scammer may actually re-direct the victim to the real bank page when he clicks the link in the email. What the victim doesn’t see is that when he clicked on that link, a virus may be installed on his computer with a tiny piece of software called a keylogger.
Keystroke logger is software that monitors each keystroke typed on the keyboard. So now when he types in his username and password, this information is transferred to the scammer.
NEVER click on links contained in these scam emails. If you think you may have done by mistake, contact your bank IMMEDIATELY.
bank scam email
