A heart-warming story - not :)
I use a service -which shall remain unnamed- to send and receive money on line. Once upon a time, I received an email that seemed to be sent by this service, asking me to click a link in the mail and verify my information (read: password).
Of course I'm not as stupid as I look (or maybe I don't look as stupid as I am, still got to figure that one out), but if you click that link, you are sent to a page on which you are asked for your password. The person on the receiving end can then use your password and help themselves to your money.
The service I use has an email where you can forward suspicious looking mails. I forwarded the mail.
Within seconds I received a reply. Yes. Seconds.
In the reply I was thanked for forwarding this suspicious email. They then confirmed that it was a phishing attempt. I was assured that the security of my account is important to them.
After giving this some consideration, I realised that all I really got was an auto-reply. Nobody had looked at the forwarded mail. Curiosity got the better of me. Was their system programmed maybe to detect certain keywords in a mail, thus recognising it as a phishing attempt? Only one way to test and find out for sure. I hadn't emptied my spam folder yet and found a generous offer for viagra at a low price. Perfect, exactly what I was looking for.
I forwarded the offer for viagra to the same place I had forwarded the scam mail to. The reply came within seconds.. thank you so much for forwarding this suspicious looking mail. It is a phishing attempt, blah blah.. The security of your account is important to us, blah blah..
It does make one wonder doesn't it. Although maybe the customer gets an auto reply while the forwarded mail goes in a queue to be check by their staff later.
ReplyDeleteOne can only hope that the company does follow through to track down and stop the fakes.
Auto replies can be useful, but too many companies overuse them to cut costs by taking the thinking human element out of the situation. (Of course, that's assuming that the human element thinks which isn't always the case :-))
ReplyDeleteHas anyone ever heard from a real Entrecard person?
Zandranna, yes one can only hope. If there is a real person on the other end, I hope they enjoyed the viagra offer :)
ReplyDeleteFrancis.. Nope. Never. A week after I started using entrecard, it was down for over 2 days. I contacted them on the first day, never got a reply, so I made up imaginary replies, they can be seen here:
http://captchasfun.blogspot.com/2011/01/entrecard-down.html
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ReplyDeletePretty sad really but had a good laugh at the Viagra part lol.
ReplyDelete