Patriot Act Scam

The latest email scam going around


To whom it may concern;

In cooperation with the Department Of Homeland Security,
Federal, State and Local Governments your account has been
denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act.
While we have only a limited amount of evidence gathered on
your account at this time it is enough to suspect that
currency violations may have occurred in your account and due
to this activity we have withdrawn Federal Deposit Insurance
on your account until we verify that your account has not been
used in a violation of the Patriot Act.

As a result Department Of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge
has advised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to
suspend all deposit insurance on your account until such time
as we can verify your identity and your account information.

Please verify through our IDVerify below. This information
will be checked against a federal government database for
identity verification. This only takes up to a minute and when
we have verified your identity you will be notified of said
verification and all suspensions of insurance on your account
will be lifted.

[spoofed URLs go here]
Failure to use IDVerify below will cause all insurance for
your account to be terminated and all records of your account
history will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in
Washington D.C. for analysis and verification. Failure to
provide proper identity may also result in a visit from Local,
State or Federal Government or Homeland Security Officials.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

Donald E. Powell
Chairman Emeritus FDIC

This is, of course, utter bunk--- a "phishing" scam designed to get
information about your bank accounts. Like the classic Nigerian scams,
the best response is just to hit Delete.

 

This one's a bit more insidious than the old Nigerian/Spanish Prisoner one, since it makes use of a problem with IE that allows the phishers to hide part of the contents of the URL. Microsoft has released a patch to "fix" the problem that's being exploited, but it's really more of a hack than a true fix. I don't know of any other browsers that are vulnerable to this exploit.