Abbey email scam

[YourStressManager]

This morning I recieved an email, allegedly from the Abbey Building Society. It had no 'header' and is obviously a scam!!

Dear valued Abbey Customer,

We recently have determined that different computers have logged into your
Abbey Online Banking account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons.
We now need you to log into your account and verify your account activity.

It then invites me to click on a link to log in!! Has anyone else had one of these? Don't do it..although I don't really think anyone would!! :D

www.yourstressmanager.co.uk (http://www.yourstressmanager.co.uk)

[Mattonella Tile Studio]

We regularly get the ones from Abbey, and Halifax too.

[GaryMc]

There are Abbey, Halifax, Lloyds TSB and HSBC ones that I have seen - all along the lines of 'your account has been accessed', 'Important info about your account' etc

[Zöe]

I've had a few of these. Usually from banks I don't bank with. They are normally full of spelling mistakes though which makes it quite easy to tell they are scams.

[YourStressManager]

I must have been lucky up till now!! :D

Neil

[GaryMc]

In which case, brace yourself!

[paulhalsey]

You can tell it's not from a real bank if it doesn't say, like most of the things they send me, that " we are charging you £10 for stating the bleedin obvious"!

[MartCactus]

It then invites me to click on a link to log in!! Has anyone else had one of these? Don't do it..although I don't really think anyone would!! :D


Its called "phishing" - google for this term.

I get loads of these, purporting to be from all sorts of banks (even foreign ones), from ebay, paypal etc. I guess you send a million mails you only need a few suckers to do it. Its the reason lots of banks (my barclays and hsbc business accounts both do) give you a dongle that generates a numeric key you have to use to login... its an attempt to make any information the phisher gets from you useless because the dongle-generated code is only valid for a very short period of time (eg 30 seconds).

[Edward Moss]

I get the Abbey ones on a regular basis, every time I mark it as junk in Entourage and still it goes into my inbox. Although those very nice and very very generous Nigerians have stopped emailing me.

[JackieC]

The ones from Abbey were particularly dangerous over the last few weeks when Abbey switched their business banking and lots of Users were having trouble. A phishing attack at just the right time and you might be tempted, even if you are usually vigilant.

[andychukse]

My advise is to be very vigilante. That mail of your looks fishy.

[frauke]

There are so many of these, even from the HMRC (!) anywhere you may have access to money, which with your info someone else can access..... paypal, credit card accounts even....... Its like the people who used to ring up saying they are your bank and get you to tell them your personal details, card and pin number to confirm your ID - then spend your money or steal your ID. You can forward them to the organisations concerned, who are supposed to "look into them". I don't think they can do much - except shut down the links. These are usually set up on "hacked servers" somewhere well hidden. A couple of years ago, I had a problem with one web site, which I reported to my ISP. They looked into it, and found my site was being used as a link to eventually a server in Brazil where someone had set up a fake login to Paypal, on a site of a Newspaper there. They may not be able to find the people, but they can shut down web pages where the links take you.

They are random, I get them all the time from Banks I don't even bank with. The people who send them, will e-mail billions of random people........ all they need is one person to take it seriously, and provide the details .....

All you need to remember is no organisation like a bank will ever put a link on a e-mail and ask you to login...... And like many things - if in doubt delete.

[TaxiDave]

Over the last week we have had this email at least twice a day. So I set up a rule in our email account to delete them as soon as they arrive. Most banks don't send out emails to "A valued Customer" so just bin them or send them to the banks fraud dept. The more they get the more they can stop

[trilby274]

Most banks have a 'phishing' department these days (eg NatWest is "phishing@natwest.co.uk"). Just forward the message to them but never click on the link.

[yorkshirejames]

I saw an alliance & leicester phish email a couple of weeks ago, and the URL was very realistic indeed. When you hovered over it you could see that the URL was http://mybank.alliance-leicester.co.uk.vc6w2h4ruuj.com/index.php


I've taken a couple of characters out of the string in the middle, lest it be a unique string they've sent to my email address, but you get the idea.


The bottom line is that your bank will never email you and tell you to click a link to go to their site.

[shaunb]

i get these all the time as well, from banks i dont have accounts with, you can usually tell by just reading the first line, if you have any sort off account with someone, they will know your name, and start the email with Dear Mr/Mrs Smith...Not Dear Valued Customer.

Just got to be careful.