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Business News/ Money / Don’t fall for that spam mail bait
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Don’t fall for that spam mail bait

Don’t fall for that spam mail bait

Illustration: Shyamal Banerjee/MintPremium

Illustration: Shyamal Banerjee/Mint

Every day, your mailbox is flooded with numerous emails—personal mails, subscription mails and junk mails. While the spam filter takes care of most of the unwanted junk, there are a few which make it to your inbox. According to the latest report by global security solutions provider Symantec Corp., India generates the maximum number of spams and phishing mails among Asian countries. Phishing mails take you to fraudulent websites. While the easiest way to deal with these emails is to simply ignore, there are a few that will deceive you, entice you, even humour you, and if you bite the bait, ultimately make you a fraud victim or worse, even a criminal. Himanshu Srivastava, vice-president-strategy, Techprocess Solutions Ltd, a company that provides technology and online payment services to businesses, says, “There are basically two types of frauds. The technology-enabled and the social engineering frauds. Social engineering is a type of fraud where people are manipulated into divulging confidential information rather than by breaking in or using technical hacking techniques. Around 99% cases of frauds occur by the social engineering route. Lack of awareness is one of the prime reason."

Four kinds of emails to ignore.

Click on this link or lose your account

Illustration: Shyamal Banerjee/Mint

You’ve just won £50,000

The audacity of fraudsters has reached such levels that they even issue fraud letter in the apex bank’s name. RBI has stated on its website: “The fraudsters have now resorted to issuing certificates, letters, circulars on letterhead that looks like that of the Reserve Bank of India’s and purportedly signed by its executives/senior officials to make such offers look genuine. The fraudsters also convince the victims by impersonating as senior officials of the bank with telephone numbers and/or fictitious email IDs. Many fraudsters have even opened accounts with banks in India and advised public to deposit money in these accounts towards various charges, taxes, duties, etc. Once the money is deposited in their account, people mailing such offers withdraw the money and then vanish. The victim thus loses the money already paid."

I need help from a repressive regime

Then there are request for help emails that beseech for help in someway and in return promises to give you a small commission or a reward. Usually, the fraudster claims to have access to several million dollars and wants you to help him or her take this money out of his country. All they need for you to do is send your bank account information and some advance fee to pay for the cost of the transfer of funds. But the enormous reward in foreign currency never arrives. Another version is when you inadvertently open a fraudsters email. That way they get access to all you contacts in your email account.

Joshi says, “The fraudster sends an email to all your contacts stating that you or your relative is travelling abroad and lost all money in travel, and they (your contacts) should make a small fund transfer in the account number provided in the email." Fall for such cry for help and you could very well lose money.

Read this emergency drill mail, while I infect your computer

The last type of emails are the ones that pass on misleading information.

An email, that’s been doing the rounds for last one year or so is the one that tells you how you can alert the police using the automated teller machine (ATM) in case a thief enters while you are using the machine. According to the email, if your ATM PIN is 1234 and you punch it in reverse, that is 4321, an alarm alerts the nearest police station and help will be on its way. K.V.S. Manian, group head—consumer banking, Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd, says, “All such emails are humbug and customers must ignore them. In fact, when banks have any facility, they always communicate to the customers using various modes. They don’t need such email forwards to communicate." As harmless as these emails may seem, what they do is give misleading information. And as a matter of principle, they should not be forwarded. Not to mention that such emails could be full of viruses and your system could be infected with spyware, a software that allows someone else to read data on your machine and control it. No prize for guessing what happens next.

bindisha.s@livemint.com

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Published: 20 May 2010, 10:24 PM IST
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