Blogging Tips – Phishing Emails to Scam Bank Accounts

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Online scams are not new. You get phishing emails asking you to sign up with your bank accounts & emails prompting you to provide your financial details. The 20/20 reported the famous “Work At Home Scam” that was run by international gangs & that affected hundreds of people.

Email providers spend billions of dollars annually keeping their systems ready to catch as many phishing emails & scamming attempts as possible. But yet, many of them get through to your Inbox. And they sure find some unsuspecting people to fall into their traps.

Typically, it is easy to identify these emails even if your ISP doesn’t mark them as spam.

They communicate a sense of urgency – as if the whole would fall apart if you don’t click on a link right now. Their “call to action” is usually very promising with phrases like “Click Now to Avoid Disruption of Service“, “Click Here to Prevent Closure of Your Bank Account” & “Click to Take Action Now“.

The return email does not match the email address it came from – since these scamming & phishing emails are routed through various mail servers worldwide, the return email address is often different from the email address you received the email from.

Technically, it is possible for anyone with very simple knowledge of mail servers & Unix programming language to send emails using a false “Sender’s Name”. However, any email has to be sent through an email server. Scammers often use the domains & email servers of unsuspecting webmasters to send out these emails. It could happen to you or me, we never know!

The “click here” link routes you to a different location – if you notice in the picture below, the link in the body of the email gives you the feeling it has come from the Bank of America. When you bring your mouse on the link, the status bar shows a different link at the bottom left corner of the screen. In this example, it shows:

http://bucatasosetapp.com/BOA1/www.bankofamerica.com/sslencrypt218bit/online_banking/index.php?boaaboaaboa

Are these phishing emails affecting you indirectly?

Absolutely Yes!

You may not be clicking on these links but you could be affected in more ways than one.

1. Abusing your email services – The phishing emails could be routed through your email server. If you are running your online business & host a website or a blog, you have access to email services. Hackers could get into your web host & use your email services (also called SMTP servers) to send these phishing emails.

Your domain could be identified as a spamming domain without you even knowing it.

2. Your newsletters could end in junk – If you are running your online business & you have users who have subscribed to your updates, your emails could be ending up in their junk folder or worse still, the ISP could be blocking your emails altogether.

This would render all your email campaigns useless & cost you a lot of money to fix.

3. You could transmit viruses in your emails – If hackers & spammers have access to your email servers, your emails could be made to transmit illegal content, virus or any other type of software programs that could cause disaster to anyone who opens them.

This could have severe legal implications & at the least, you will have a lot of your trusted readers unsubscribe from your email programs, costing you a lot of money & falling business revenues.

4. It could hurt Google earnings & Adwords spending – Scamming emails & phishing emails affect Google advertisers & publishers alike. So if your business makes money from Google ads, or spends money on Google Adwords for advertising, your earning as well as your spending will be affected adversely. This is closely tied to the ways in which Click Frauds are identified. Read about a snapshot of international Click Fraud Heat Map.

This could bring your ad revenues down with increasing your advertising spends, cutting into your profit margins.

In the next post, I shall share a few ways in which you can protect your users and your online assets. There are some simple ways to help you safe guard your online content including your email services & websites.