Phishers Abuse FBI for Malicious Intent

Recently, the Daviess County, Indiana Sheriff's office has issued a warning to the US residents about an ongoing Internet scam. According to the officers, several people have received e-mails purportedly coming from the Anti-Terrorist and Monitoring Crimes Division of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The phony e-mail claims that the recipient's bank accounts have been investigated for fraudulent transactions, of which the receiver is yet unaware. It demands a couple hundred dollars from the recipient so as to fix the problem. The e-mail further says that the recipient will receive a new ATM card and pin number.

The security experts have confirmed that these e-mails are fradulent. The Sheriff's office has urged that the recipients of the e-mail to visit FBI's official Web site www.IC3.gov.

Meanwhile, FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has advised users to avoid responding to the e-mail as such unsolicited e-mails are not sent by the agency. FBI said that though its Executives are briefed on various investigations, but they do not communicate people personally regarding such matters. Moreover, IC3 does not post threatening e-mails or messages to the users demanding payments for cyber crimes.

The recipients are recommended not to click-open any embedded link in such fake e-mails as they are likely to contain viruses or malicious content. The security experts also provided the way to distinguish a fake e-mail from the legitimate ones. According to them, fake e-mails often have spelling and grammatical or punctuation mistakes.

FBI noted that cyber criminals send fake e-mails on a large scale to the innocent users after obtaining their general details which can easily be accessed on the Internet. These fraudsters create bogus Web sites that appear as the exact replica of the legitimate Web sites and then send unsolicited e-mails to the innocent people.

FBI has suggested that the users should protect their personally identifiable information (PII), as revealing PII means compromising the user identity.

The users need to become increasingly smart to overcome such phishing scams as phishers are constantly coming up with new and sophisticated ways to dodge the Internet users.

Related article: Phishers Expand Their Sphere of Attacks

» SPAMfighter News - 3/16/2009