In the last few days, we have received two emails at Comp-U-Train purporting to be from ABSA bank.
This email rang our alarm bells immediately as firstly we don’t bank with ABSA and secondly we recognised it as a typical “Phishing” email
This email is a typical Phishing hoax and is a way to try to get you to reveal your banking username & password. Once the criminals have this information they can log onto your banking account and part you with your hard earned money.
The email message can arrive in many guises including worrying messages that your account has been suspended or your “money transfer” has been completed. As you can see from the email received by us which is shown at the bottom of this Blog, the perpetrator threatens to suspend our account if we don’t follow their instructions!
If you click on a link in any email message or webpage, be wary if the Internet address shown in the website address window at the top of web browser doesn’t show the correct “domain”. Also, watch out for if the “http” doesn’t have a “s” at the end (which shows the webpage being viewed is encypted). There should also be a little padlock at the end of the window. Another common trait is poor grammar or spelling mistakes as most of these emails come from non-English speaking countries.
Finally and I can’t stress this enough, your bank will never email you asking you for your account information. If you have any concerns then either contact your bank directly, or dial in the bank’s email address yourself rather than using an embedded link to drive you there as it maybe driving you over the financial cliff to ruin instead!
Below is one of the phishing emails so that you can see what they look like:
—–Original Message—–
“From: ABSA Check Account [
Sent: 21 January 2013 11:23 AM
Subject: Service Protection
Dear Customer,
We are doing all our best to protect you from the high rate of internet and other related form of banking scams. It has come to our notice that our ATM service is the subject of a new hacking device, hence we are upgrading all forms of banking services from Absa,which includes Internet Banking, Telephone Banking and ATM Banking. You are required to verify your login details so that your account can be upgraded and we can secure you to a safe banking.
Absa Protects your online banking, to Upgrade to our new SSL security servers, log in below:)
Upgrade to Hyper-V Security server here (URL removed to protect the our innocent Blog readers!)
Note: If you choose to ignore our request, we will have no choice but to suspend or permanently deactivate your account.
Kind Regards
Absa Digital Banking Services”
For more information please look at this Hubpage article:
http://rachellewilliams.hubpages.com/hub/Computers-101-What-is-Phishing
