Phishing E-mails
By: Brian Fietsam
Customers Need Be Aware of Scams!
This is a reminder for all customers about the importance of deleting phishing E-mails. According to Wikipedia, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames.
If you receive any suspicious E-mails similar to the examples below, please contact us by telephone. We will never send you an E-mail that asks for any information, we will ALWAYS call you. Below are several phishing E-mails that our customers have received over the years. Please familiarize youself with this type of E-mail and rember to never respond to these E-mails or click any links contained in the E-mail.
Warning: The Examples below are all phishing E-mails and should be deleted if you receive one in your inbox. They are provided soley for the purposes of educating our customers for the protection of their personal information while using email. We will always contact your by phone if we need any information from you. These examples say papadocs and wisperhome, but could be replaced with sincsurf or ezeeweb.
See All News ArticlesExample 1:
Subject: Schedule Upgrade
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:56:13 -0800
Attention ,
This message is from the Technical Support, Information technology Service (ITS )wishes to inform you as a matter of urgency that we are undertaking some essential, but extensive,maintenance to improve our webmail this weekend.The maintenance is part of our ongoing efforts to improve and give you the best Mail service we can as we say season greetings to our webmail users.The need to be updated as part of our continuing commitment is to protect your account and to reduce the instance of spam mails on and hackers log on our webmail stream.
Beginning the early hours of tuesday 12th Jan,(PDT) you may experience problems accessing your webmail account.To avoid your account been affected,Due to this, to ensure that your service is not interrupted,we request you to confirm and update your webmail details as required Below..Email(____)Username(___)Password(___)Date of birth(___) Contact Address(___)Phone number(___)to prevent poor performance during the period of upgrade, it should be available again by midday Thursday 14th Jan,(PDT).You are likely to receive this notification until the upgrade is completed.In order to avoid delay accessing your mail,provide the required details..Failure while providing email account details might result lost of account as you might find it difficult to access your emails during upgrade
We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience
:::::: Technical Support ::::::::
Mail Technical Services
NB: We request your user name and password for Identification purpose only.Thanks for confirming your Webmail details as Upgrade process is been carried out by the ITS web team....
Example 2:
"Dear user of the papadocs.com mailing service!
We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:
http://papadocs.com/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email= This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it &from=papadocs.com&fromname=mk----Best regards, papadocs.com Technical Support."
Example 3:
"
Subject: Webmail Account Verification Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 07:38:39 -0700 From: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Reply-To: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it To: Dear webmail member,
As part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website, we are undertaking a period review of our member accounts.
You are requested to visit our site by following the link given below
http://arribba.cgi3.papadocs.com/aw-cgi/webmailISAPI.dll?UpdateInformationConfirm&bpuser=1
Please fill in the required information.
This is required for us to continue to offer you a safe and risk free environment to send and receive money online, and maintain the webmail Experience.
Thank you
Accounts Management As outlined in our User Agreement, Papadocs will periodically send you information about site changes and enhancements. Visit our Privacy Policy and User Agreement if you have any questions.Copyright © 1995-2003 papa Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners"Example 4:
"Subject line: Verify Your Wisperhome Account NowDear Wisperhome Account Owner,
This message is from wisperhome messaging center to all Wipserhome email account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base and e-mail account center. We are deleting all Wipserhome email account to create more space for new accounts.
To prevent your account from closing you will have to update it below so that we will know that it's a present used account.
***********************************************************
CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOWEmail Username : ......... .....
EMAIL Password : ...............
Date of Birth : ................
Country or Territory : .........
Webmail Website : .........
***********************************************************Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Thank you for using Wisperhome!
Warning Code:VX2G99AAJVirtually Yours,
Wisperhome tech support team "
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONEExample 5:
"Account user,
All our account owners,We are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of account so we are shutting down some accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account.If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name,password,date of bith and your country information would be needed to verify your account....
Due to the congestion in all user and removal of all unused Account, Would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 48 hours for security reasons.
* Username: ........................... ....
* Password: .............................
* Date of Birth: .........................
* Country Or Territory: ....................
After following the instructions in the sheet, your account will not be interrupted and will continue as normal. Thanks for your attention to this request. We apologize for any inconveniences. Warning!!! Account owner that refuses to update his/her account after two days of receiving this warning stands the risk of lossing his or her account permanently."