Customers of another bank are being targeted by e-mail scammers attempting to steal account information and other personal data. The e-mail appears to come from the Bank of America customer support department, but there are several misspellings and grammatical errors that make it easy to identify the message as a fake. The message arrives from custommersupport@bankofamerica.com with a subject line reading: "Security Server Update." The text of the message includes a graphic header taken from the bank's home page.
The message reads, in part:
"Dear Valued Customer,
The URL in the message points to a page that has been disabled. The IP address for the URL is registered to ISP Verio Inc. A spokeswoman at Bank of America, N.A., based in Charlotte, N.C., said the company found out about the mail Sunday night and has received some calls from customers asking about it.
The company contacted the Secret Service to help in the investigation. "We're working diligently with the authorities to try and identify the person or people behind this," said Betty Riess of Bank of America. "The [fraudulent] site was shut down Monday afternoon."
The Bank of America scam comes a week after news of a similar hoax involving First Union Bank came to light. The First Union scam involves an e-mail that asks recipients to go to a Web site and enter some personal information. The site, which has been taken down, also automatically downloaded a Trojan horse application onto visitors' PCs.
Officials at Wachovia Corp., also in Charlotte, which owns First Union, said they are continuing to work with law enforcement to track down the source of the e-mails.
Both the First Union and Bank of America e-mails seem to be going out to random e-mail addresses, much the way spam does. Both customers of the two banks and non-customers are receiving the messages.
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