'Important News About Your Bank Account', email from the 'FDIC'. Identity Theft Alert

Excite email ^ | 1/25/04 | Self

[eldoradude]

Identity Theft Alert

Below is a copy and paste of an email I received today. It is not really from the FDIC. The link which appears as "http://www.fdic.gov/idverify/cgi-bini/index.htm" actually takes you to "http://www.fdic.gov@211.75.215.137:3180/index.htm" instead. This is an increasingly common ploy to socially engineer people into giving up personal information, including access to their personal bank accounts. If you get an email like this this, do not follow the instructions! It's bogus! The sender's return address is "FDIC as Carolina_Sika@hotmail.com"

Here it is:

Subject: Important News About Your Bank Account

To whom it may concern; In cooperation with the Department Of Homeland Security, Federal, State and Local Governments your account has been denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act. While we have only a limited amount of evidence gathered on your account at this time it is enough to suspect that currency violations may have occurred in your account and due to this activity we have withdrawn Federal Deposit Insurance on your account until we verify that your account has not been used in a violation of the Patriot Act.

As a result Department Of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has advised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to suspend all deposit insurance on your account until such time as we can verify your identity and your account information.

Please verify through our IDVerify below. This information will be checked against a federal government database for identity verification. This only takes up to a minute and when we have verified your identity you will be notified of said verification and all suspensions of insurance on your account will be lifted.

http://www.fdic.gov/idverify/cgi-bin/index.htm

Failure to use IDVerify below will cause all insurance for your account to be terminated and all records of your account history will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington D.C. for analysis and verification. Failure to provide proper identity may also result in a visit from Local, State or Federal Government or Homeland Security Officials.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

Donald E. Powell

Chairman Emeritus FDIC

John D. Hawke, Jr.

Comptroller of the Currency

Michael E. Bartell

Chief Information Officer

[eldoradude]

Watch out for this and don't get fooled, it's spreading like a worm.

[NYCVirago]

It sounds like libs doing mischief.

[eldoradude]

Don't get burned by this...

[eldoradude]

It sounds like libs doing mischief

Sort of like 'White Collar Crime for DUmmies'?

[clee1]

I wonder how many thousands of dumb@$$es this is gonna burn?

[mgstarr]

I've gottten 2 of these this weekend.

[MEG33]

I never ever got a chance at the Nigerian money windfall.I keep looking in my inbox.I may delete a good email but I never open one I don't really know.

[DMCA]

Why don't people install the patch for this?

OH! I forgot, Microsoft hasen't released one yet!

[JoJo Gunn]

PING!

Michael miserable failureMoore

[eldoradude]

I wonder how many thousands of dumb@$$es this is gonna burn?

Quite a few reasonably law abiding naifs are going to turn over whatever is asked of them. After all, the gooberment has worked hard to encourage a society of docile fools. I'm not surprised to see dirtbags taking advantage. I've emailed my friends...

[DMCA]

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=833786

The above link will take you to the Microsoft KB article describing the bug.

[eldoradude]

I never ever got a chance at the Nigerian money windfall.

It will be the Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) windfall next with Mugabe kicking the bucket soon (One can hope) in South Africa.

[Democrap]

John D. Hawke, Jr.

Comptroller of the Currency

LOL

I got this exact one except the senders address was deferent, and a second came telling me my accounts have been frozen with the same idea of going to a website to give up my information.

It was funny until I remembered people fall for this crap.

[Bogey78O]

It's not an OS issue. Email all the way.

[MEG33]

Off the subject a poster just used a great new word ...crapaganda..in honor of Democrat,Progressive,Socialists "speak"

[eldoradude]

It was funny until I remembered people fall for this crap.

Yeah, and it goes out on a weekend so the crooks have a couple days of free fishing. Man I would love to ZOT! the b@$tards!

[DMCA]

Since the application in question is built into the lowest levels of the OS and ties into quite a few other apps I would have to disagree. Plus this bug allows this sort of URL spoofing to be done rather easly.

[Choose Ye This Day]

How long until one of the Dem president wanna-be's claim this is true, that Homeland Security is denying FDIC coverage to MILLIONS of law-abiding citizens, creating fear and havoc...

It'll probably come up in the next debate.

[Cultural Jihad]

Not an OS issue? No, it's an Internet Explorer issue. Microsoft is listing all sorts of ways we can paste in java commands to test a webpage, but they really need to just fix this bug.

[eldoradude]

Al Sharpton or Howard Dean?