New Email Hoax on the Loose
Jan. 26th, 2004 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearThis one is claiming that due to the Patriot Act, your account is under suspicion and will lose FDIC insurance support (which is garbage -- the BANK is what's insured by FDIC, and in spite of the Patriot crap, the feds can't selectively decide to not insure individual accounts in a bank, and if they try, the courts will have a field day on it).
Please keep in mind that ANY email that asks for a bank number and checking account number is a hoax. Period. Whether its EBay, PayPal, some Nigerian, your own bank (they certainly don't need it), or the Feds. Nobody can ask for your bank number unless you intend to do a financial transaction with them (your work for direct deposit, or utilities and credit card companies for doing an e-check), and they'll ask for it in person or on the phone, with clear grounds for what is and isn't covered.
Text of one version of the letter:
the URL gets a 404 right now. my guess is that it was a faked link, where the text shown is this fdic url, but the link itself went somewhere else. whether it got to the fake site or the fdic sometimes depends on the email software's html interpreter; I've had paypal hoaxes that would have worked in outlook/outlook express, but my php/html mailer turned into garbage.
Please keep in mind that ANY email that asks for a bank number and checking account number is a hoax. Period. Whether its EBay, PayPal, some Nigerian, your own bank (they certainly don't need it), or the Feds. Nobody can ask for your bank number unless you intend to do a financial transaction with them (your work for direct deposit, or utilities and credit card companies for doing an e-check), and they'll ask for it in person or on the phone, with clear grounds for what is and isn't covered.
Text of one version of the letter:
Subject: Important News About Your Bank Account
To whom it may concern;
In cooperation with the Department Of Homeland Security, Federal, State and Local Governments your account has been denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act. While we have only a limited amount of evidence gathered on your account at this time it is enough to suspect that currency violations may have occurred in your account and due to this activity we have withdrawn Federal Deposit Insurance on your account until we verify that your account has not been used in a violation of the Patriot Act.
As a result Department Of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has advised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to suspend all deposit insurance on your account until such time as we can verify your identity and your account information.
Please verify through our IDVerify below. This information will be checked against a federal government database for identity verification. This only takes up to a minute and when we have verified your identity you will be notified of said verification and all suspensions of insurance on your account will be lifted.
http://www.fdic.gov/idverify/cgi-bin/index.htm
Failure to use IDVerify below will cause all insurance for your account to be terminated and all records of your account history will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington D.C. for analysis and verification. Failure to provide proper identity may also result in a visit from Local,State or Federal Government or Homeland Security Officials.
Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.
Donald E. Powell
Chairman Emeritus FDIC
John D. Hawke, Jr.
the URL gets a 404 right now. my guess is that it was a faked link, where the text shown is this fdic url, but the link itself went somewhere else. whether it got to the fake site or the fdic sometimes depends on the email software's html interpreter; I've had paypal hoaxes that would have worked in outlook/outlook express, but my php/html mailer turned into garbage.
