Monday, March 20, 2006

Most Improved : fraudulent email authors

A few months ago, I received one of those ridiculous fraudulent emails from the guy claiming to have wealth tied up in Zimbabwe or some such nonsense.
Today, I had three emails like this one:
Dear member,
You have received this email because we have strong reason to believe that your chase account had been recently compromised. In order to prevent any fraudulent activity from occurring we are required to open an investigation into this matter. If your account informations are not updated within the next 72 hours, then we will assume this account is fraudulent and will be suspended. We apologize for this inconvenience, but the purpose of this verification is to ensure that your chase account has not been fraudulently used and to combat fraud. Please login into your account and complete verification process. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you and we would like to thank you for your cooperation as we review this matter.
Regards,
Chase Online Team.

There's a link at the bottom of the email that you are supposed to click to log in to your account. It almost sounds legitimate, right? However, the email came to a work account that I use only for science-related stuff and not to my hotmail account, which I use for everything else. Also, in the past, I have been contacted by my credit card company after unusually high activity on my card, but they have always called and not emailed. (Twice, the unusual activity was due to me being on vacation and having several charges from an unusual location, and once, the unusual activity correlated with a shopping trip to the Wrentham Outlets.) Anyways, I called Chase and told them about the email and they said it was definitely fraudulent and that they were aware of the problem. I have decided to give email scam authors a Most Improved award, because I only noticed a couple of small grammatical errors: a missing comma and the use of the word "informations." And they didn't once refer to me as "Respectful one."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got the same email message, and I do not have a Chase account. When I went to the real chase.com website, I got an 800 number to contact the bank directly. One of their representatives asked for my social security number to "verify" I didn't have any accounts. I thought it was strange the first and only piece of information she asked for was that. (not name, city, any credit cards I used - if they are affiliated with chase) I knew I didn't have any accounts, and I had no need for her to get my full SSN.

The link on the fake email was
http://62.193.218.2/icons/JPMorganChase/index.htm

It shows up on the message as:
www.chase.com/verification/_update

The link is bad - the first link does not have any association with Chase.com, and when you try to click on any other link, it obviously doesn't connect you to the real chase location.

I hope this helps any unsuspecting guys out there.

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