|
On Friday January 12th, 2007 I received a fraudulent "phishing" email, pretending to be from Bank of America, requesting me to confirm my account and credit card information. This clearly looked like a scam, to me. Hardly a news-worthy event.
In a typical week, my in-box will see several of these emails, sent by con artists to harvest sensitive personal and financial information.
I never respond to these "phishing" emails by providing personal information. But people must respond to them, because this particular type of on-line con shows no sign of going out of fashion. There must be a pay-off for criminals who concoct these schemes.
Who responds to "phishing" emails?
How many people respond?
What kind of information is volunteered?
Before Friday January 12th, I couldn't begin to guess.
Then, I stumbled upon a file of harvested "phishing" data.
These web pages tell the story of how I found that file, what was in it and what I did about it.
Post Script. 2007.02.07
I followed the trail of an EBay phishing email.
I found a data file with more than 100 user names and passwords, entered by people who responded to the phishing email.
Good luck to those people, too.
|
|
