The Vatican wants my Bank Account Details!
June 25th, 2008 by Simon HeseltineHow many times have you received a note from the ‘widow’ of a deposed Nigerian General, or an email informing you that your email address was selected to win the UK lottery for 62 million Euros?
Obviously, they’re scam emails. Yet there must be people who fall for them or they wouldn’t keep sending them out.
An even more insidious crowd are the Phishers. These are sites that replicate the interface of your banking website, or your credit card site in order to get you to enter your account information, which they can then use to empty your accounts.
These are more difficult to detect, simply because they look like they are legit. In most cases, the only giveaway is the URL associated with the email / link.
For example, yesterday I received an email allegedly from Yahoo, informing me that my PPC account was out of funds. Clicking on the link brought me to what looked like the login page for Yahoo, yet it was the wrong URL, and my browser was kind enough to inform me that I was on a Phishing site.
Another email I received yesterday was regarding my PayPal account being suspended (I used to love getting these when I didn’t have a PayPal account). Looking at the URL sent with the message, I somehow doubt that Papal.com is legitimate, although I do have to say that it most likely isn’t anything to do with the Pontiff.
I will admit though that I sometimes do have a false positive. I received an email from a local car dealer which I immediately discounted, as the domain of the email address didn’t match their website. However, after I did a little research I found out that this was the domain of the email vendor that they were using. I do have to wonder though, how many potential customers they are losing because of this. Do they realize that people are more aware of phishing scams these days? If they’d have only used their own domain in the from field they may have seen a larger open rate.
What about you? When you’re sending emails are you making sure that the ‘from’ is from your domain? If not, are you missing out on potential customers because they think that your email may be a scam? If you’re using a service that doesn’t use your domain, try doing a campaign with your domain and compare the open rates. If you see a difference (which you should), then you’ll know what you’re missing out on – and can make the decision to switch vendors / packages.
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