Oh no!
Dear Customer, jared_.
You are receiving this message, due to you protection, Our Online Technical Security Service Foreign IP Spy recently detected that your online account was recently logged on from am 85.161.162.145 without am International Access Code (I.A.C) and from an unregistered computer, which was not verified by the Our Online Service Department.
If you last logged in you online account on Thursday April 5th 2007, by the time 6:45 pm from an Foreign Ip their is no need for you to panic, but if you did log in your account on the above Date and Time, kindly take 2-3 minute of your online banking experince to verify and register your computer now to avoid identity theft, your protection is our future medal.
Verification Link
Notice: You can acess your account from a foreign IP or country by getting am (I.A.C) International Access Code, by contacting our local brances close to you.
Note to spammers/phishers: I’m pretty sure that if Bank of America actually wanted to e-mail me regarding my account, they probably wouldn’t craft such an incredibly poor letter littered with grammar and spelling errors.
It does kind of make me wonder a couple things, though:
- Who the heck is going to fall for this?
- How many more people would fall for it if the e-mail was actually well written?
11 Comments
#1:
Well I do remember a story about an eBay scam you posted about a long time ago.
#2:
People are dumb otherwise they wouldn’t even try.
Another good reason to advocate openDNS.
What was the scam about? I don’t remember it.
The “filtering” capabilities of openDNS is actually one of the potential downsides for me. As with any filtering system, the question is who controls the list, and what happens when something gets put on the list that you actually want to go to or see.
Can’t find the post but it was about Martha replying to an eBay scam e-mail.
To answer your statement:
How does OpenDNS decide if a site is a phishing site?
How do I report a phishing site to OpenDNS?
How do I tell OpenDNS about a mistakenly-blocked site?
Oops
What is phishing?
How does OpenDNS decide if a site is a phishing site?
How do I report a phishing site to OpenDNS?
How do I tell OpenDNS about a mistakenly-blocked site?
Dammit,
How does OpenDNS decide if a site is a phishing site?
How do I report a phishing site to OpenDNS?
How do I tell OpenDNS about a mistakenly-blocked site?
What’s with all the duplicate links?
Anyway, I’m not too worried about them blocking phishing sites that actually are phishing sites, but they do mention “phishing and malware” related sites in their description.
I’m not accusing OpenDNS of anything like this, but to me any content filtering is a slippery slope towards censorship. For example, what are the criteria used to determine whether a particular page / site is “malware” related? What if I (or an anonymous commenter) am discussing a particular security vulnerability on my blog which could be exploited to do some damage by people with foul intentions? Is that enough to get my site blacklisted? If so, what do I do if I complain and they tell me they feel that they were correct and it should be blocked?
Since those criteria are not disclosed it’s basically arbitrary as far as we know. They might have business relationships with companies that allow undue influence in their filtering decisions as well. For example, if they’re in bed with Apple and Apple all of a sudden decides they aren’t down with the AppleTV hacks anymore, then your blog could be banned for distributing “illegal hacking instructions”.
Again, I’m not saying OpenDNS would ever do something like that, it’s just a general concern I have with all net filtering systems. Then again, they are a company where management can change hands at any time, so you never know.
For some who aren’t bothered by that, it’s perfectly fine to use them, as long as you understand and are willing to accept the potential limitations.
always wear a condom on your computer, because “your protection is our future medal.”
There are trade offs for everything. In the case of the eBay incident I rather prevent it from happening then having the inconvenience of not being able to view a site for either an “hour” or until I take 5 seconds and change a network preference.
The above doesn’t account for the censorship issue but from what I see the companies they use are community driven. So if there is a problem with an incorrectly tagged site then it would should be changed fairly quick. Similar to the approach of open source security.
You’re “concern” is understandable but I prefer prevention rather than a speculative concern.
If it does get out of control there’s always the option of stopping your use and/or contributing to the communities they use or any other company uses.
Yes, that’s true; in most cases OpenDNS is an opt-in choice, so it’s completely up to the individual whether they want to use it, and in those cases it would probably be wise to reap the benefits as long as you could work around it if the limitation were to ever come up.
I would have more of a problem with it if it were in a public access environment (such as a library) where the users couldn’t change the setting themselves.
The community driven aspect of the filtering list doesn’t really change my opinion of the concept of filtering in general; if it’s not an optional choice by the user then I’m opposed to it flat out (so I’m OK with OpenDNS doing it as long as the use of OpenDNS is optional). The reason is that even if it is truly community driven (which most are not - the company usually still has the final say) then it’s still an opportunity for discriminatory censorship. If something I’d like to read is blocked, I don’t really care whether the larger community agrees that it should be or not.
Have gotten the paypal spamail a few times per month.
The first one I forwarded to Dave D and also looked up the return email address and it was in nigeria…..
This must work in some instances as they keep trying.