I just had a phish addressed to “Dear Fleet Bank valued customer”. I have, of course, never heard of Fleet Bank.
It goes on in the usual style: As part of our ongoing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website, we have introduced a new special FraudAction Detection Program.This program should provide an earlier awareness of potential fraudulent activities with your account.We have already enrolled your account in this Program. Membership is free, however, in order to authenticate your enrollment please confirm your account details below
Not only have they got the English a bit wrong, though no wronger than corporations often do; the address to which you are invited to click has been mistyped. The link goes to http://21099.217.3/sys/fl/, which Sam Spade can’t resolve at all. Presumably, they dropped a full stop.
Oh, and the time stamp on the letter is set two hours ahead of GMT. That would be, hmm, yes, somewhere in Eastern Europe. Who would have thought it? And the date is Monday 12 Jan 2004.
On the other hand, if you bank with Egg, they have passwords that are not case sensitive and don’t allow punctuation. It’s hard to work out sometimes just who of the people pretending to be a real online bank has money in their vaults.
I heard somewhere that sometimes the crims put mipsellings into their emails to make people think they’re dolts, so that they’ll reckon they can swindle the swindlers, but I suppose that would only really work for the 419 scams.
Yes, phishers really must meet a higher standard.
As for Fleet Bank, you’ll find it at http://www.fleet.com, I think. Your dot-com address has attracted people targeting the US.
Even so, they could have set their computer better.
The schools have probably broken up in Bulgaria by now.
As you say, the standards of many marketing communications from the kosher concerns are edging into the ersatz zone.
Our anti-spam software regularly dumps PR missives into the sin bin — if only they could see the notes from our jargonophilic CEO — due to the flacks wholeheartedly adopting the kewl tekneex of the more upbeat Viagra dispensers.
I used to check for this and alert the afflicted PRs, presuming that we weren’t the only people to so categorise their efforts, but I gave up for two reasons: the PRs never bothered to reply, and on mature reflection I decided that our mail filter had probably got its diagnostics right.
R