Keys Corner

We have noticed that over the last months that the quality of phishing e-mails (mails which try to get you to type your account names and passwords into fake websites that look just like the web site of your bank or credit card company) has gone from being an obvious fraud (wrong web address visible in the window of your bank’s “homepage”, bad grammar and spelling, etc.) to highly plausible.

Obviously, if you don’t happen to bank at, say, the Washington Mutual Bank, you are unlikely to be taken in for a moment. But the number of phishing attempts is increasing and so is the number of banks and other organisations being targeted – targets include PayPal and non-US banks, such as the German Postbank and the Deutsche Bank.

If you want to check out a suspicious mail, one of the best places to go is to The Anti-Phishing Working Group website, which tracks and describes the phishing attacks. Here is an example of an attempt to phish PayPal users for their credit card details.

The organisation is sponsored by some of the big names in finance and computer systems, including Visa, MasterCard, Symantec, and VeriSign. This is also a good place to report suspected phishing activity.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 09:01:42 and is filed under Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.