Phishing Email

Here is a Typical Phishing Email

It seems to be from "Federal Insurance Company"... but look at the email address shown: colarre51 @ fdic . gov. Does that sound like a legitimate email address to you?

Subject line: FDIC: About your business accounts

Body: Dear Business Customer, We have important information about your bank. Please click here to view information. This includes information on the acquiring bank (if applicable), how your accounts and loans are affected, and how vendors can file claims against the receivership.

Does this read or look like the kind of email a real bank would send to its customers?

"We have important information about your bank. Please click here to view information."

As is usual with bogus emails, the grammar is poor.

Red alerts should be going off immediately as soon as you see an email like this. "Dear Business Customer"???

Anyway, let's have a closer look. When you hover your mouse or point at a link in an email, you should be able to see where that link is taking you on the Web. When I point to the first link in this email, look what pops up at the bottom:

"devletim.tk"...

"devletim.tk"???

A quick Google search informs us that dot tk is the top-level domain for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand. This link will probably NOT take us to any site that our bank actually maintains.

All the links in the email go to the same place:

Clearly this email is NOT from who it seems to be from. This example is fairly obvious, as it contains no graphics or logos from any legitimate organization. Some are more insidious. You should always pay attention to where email links are trying to take you - BEFORE you click on them.