How often have you received an official-looking e-mail ostensibly from a bank asking you to confirm your credit details?
| PHISHY MAIL: SAMPLE 1 |
In the last month alone, the MONEY TODAY team has received six such mails. And it sure smells phishy. For the uninitiated, phishing is an online scam where fraudsters rely on spam e-mail, pop-up messages or IM to lure unsuspecting victims to a fake website designed to capture information like bank account detail, credit card numbers or even passwords.
This data is then used to impersonate the victim to misuse his bank account, launder money, apply for credit cards, take out loans, etc. India, now hosting 8% of phishing sites, bags the fourth slot in the global rankings.
All major banks have been targeted so they are now taking increased precautions. Says Maninder Juneja, senior general manager, ICICI Bank, “Our monitoring cell watches out for spoof sites and tries to bring them down by coordinating with the domain name registrars.”
| PHISHY MAIL: SAMPLE 2 |
Other banks are focussing on more stringent verification. Says Sai Narain, head, transaction banking and strategic initiatives, Standard Chartered Bank, “We’ll soon have a two-factor authentication that will ask customers to provide an additional authentication code, generated at random and known only to them.”
However, precaution is best taken at an individual level. Watch out for the following tell-tale signs when you get any such e-mails.
