Advanced Email Scam?

If you read my previous post regarding New Scan Has Arrived, I touched about common scam methods as below:

1. Africa wealth scam via Email

2. ATM card scam by recording your PIN number

3. ATM PIN number scam via SMS

4. Credit card scam via Email & phishing web site

5. Hong Kong jackpot scam via phone & SMS

6. Credit Card abuse scam via phone & SMS (added in April 2009)

There is a similar method discovered in the local market lately. I have saw 4 similar scams in the newspaper this week alone. Yes, you did not hear me wrongly, it's SIMILAR METHOD, but still, it works effectively. 

Basically this new scam method is very straight forward. You had received an email and claimed that an irregular activity had been detected on your bank account. You are required to confirm and verify your information by clicking on a link in the email.

You must be wonder most of the local banks do offer SMS or token based 2-tier authentications. Without the 6 digits authorization code sent to you from the bank, there should be no transaction confirmation. It sounds quite safe when the bank introduced this security feature to us 4/5 years ago. From the newspaper detail, I believe the fraudsters already found their way to breach them.

The victims described that they only click on the link in the email and then they found out their money in the account went missing. As per report, after 2 minutes of clicking the link, the victim received an SMS from bank system confirmed that the maximum daily fund transfer has been done.

Whatever security measure introduced by bank, it's just to minimize the fraud. It's not 100% safe. So we need to protect ourself. Anyway, I received a lot of similar emails for this case, just to share with you one of the sample here and I hope we won't become the next victim.

Have a nice weekend, folks.