Phishing E-mail Threatens to Take Life

At Rock Island County, United States, the Moline Police Department said that it is investigating a new online scam in which death threats were delivered to two residents of Moline over e-mail on February 10, 2008. qctimes reported this on February 10, 2008.

The threat e-mails carried the subject head as "Be More Careful", while the message said that the sender had been hired to take the life of the recipient and collect the victim's picture, name and other details, although unspecified, police said.

The e-mail also attempts to negotiate fees to spare the life of the recipient and talks about selling to the recipient an audiotape about soliciting hire for murder. The message also warns the recipient not to inform the police.

According to qconline.com, Moline police said via a February 10, 2008 press release that they have found the threats to be linked to a phishing scheme. Also, the e-mail writer has been tracked back to some foreign countries and police determined that the e-mails originated from Israel and Mexico.

Moreover, the threats in all the e-mails were nearly identical and the messages had a basic form in which the sender's objective is to wring out private information like bank and credit card information. According to the police, the sender's intention is to get the victim to respond so that he gets an opportunity to extract out either financial information or money from victims.

In a statement Lt. Jerome Patrick said that there is no imminent danger to anybody in the cities of Quad. This scam is not the first of its kind. Patrick said that there could be more e-mail and that many people would understand it as phishing or spam and not report it to the police, which is okay.

Moline police also said that they have officers trained to investigate cases of this kind. It advised people receiving similar messages not to respond. Rather, they should inform the Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICCC) of the FBI.

The problem of phishing threat seems to grow bigger since the FBI's ICCC has issued a warning that such attacks have increased dramatically during December 2007-January 2008.

Related article: Phishing With A Redirector Code

» SPAMfighter News - 2/18/2008