Apparently May is “Scams Awareness Month” (who thinks up of these things?) and so I took a little peak inside my spam box and I found an interesting little number which I thought I would share with you as my contribution to help raise awareness…
It is a fairly traditional phishing email, made interesting by the fact that the scammers are trying to pass themselves off as The FBI. It is certainly not the worst effort I have seen but it is still littered with errors which are a dead giveaway. The sneakiest bit was the email address which shows as “F.B.I WASHINGTONG D.C <fbidirectoroffice@fbi.gov>”. The bit in angled brackets gives a false impression of a genuine fbi email address however this is just the way the fraudsters have set “display name” … click on reply and you get a totally different email address.
Anyway… here we go:
As ever stay safe out there!
D.
About Darren Hodder
Darren is the director of Fraud Consulting Ltd, which was incorporated in July 2009 to provide vendor neutral fraud consultancy services to clients covering financial services, banking, telecommunications and insurance industries, both in the UK and internationally.
His experience ranges from working on single portfolio in-house solutions through to national fraud bureaux and data sharing initiatives. Prior to his current position Darren worked for Experian Decision Analytics (EDA) where he held various roles within the Fraud & Identity Solutions and Global Technology groups over a 10 year period.
Darren is an active member of the Fraud Advisory Panel, IAFCI and the ACFE. He is also a member of the editorial board for E-Finance & Payments Law & Policy published by Cecile Park Publishing.
Follow Darren on twitter: @FraudAssist