There Are Many Fishies in the Sea

And some may yet take the bait.

I got an email this morning in my Yahoo! account from 'Citicorp'. I've heard about emails where they masquerade as valid businesses, give you a link to click to which leads to a site that looks legitimate. This one is impeccable. The logos, branding, language and layout could fool any Citibank customer.

[Click on image to view full site image.]

Under the pretenses of security and housekeeping, the email, entitled "Important Information from Citibank Billing Department", asks you to go to a site to verify your account details. The site itself has a form that asks for your ATM/Debit Card number (CIN) and PIN number. It's even got real error-handling - it checks that your input for the debit card number is at least 14 digits long. After signing on, it leads you to a page that asks you for your credit card details, like expiry date and your card verification number.

Most of us rational thinking people may not fall for this scam. We would definitely wonder how the bank got hold of our Yahoo! email address, or why they would choose to do business with us via this method. We would question why a bank needs us to verify information that they should know better, because all the information requested by the email/site is required for us to do any transaction with the bank.

But like those Nigerian scams, someone will fall for this. Maybe even someone who transacted at a merchant I frequent. And the bank, being rightly paranoid, will probably end up blocking the whole range of card numbers, including mine, once they find out that security has been compromised. Sigh... here we go again!

Related Article: Virus Writers Getting Greedy