Thursday, May 20, 2004
Bank Scams
For historic reasons and my own stupidity, I get a large amount of spam. (Basically, I put up a lot of early web sites for my company and others, and the addresses got harvested.) They do not cause me a problem, as I’ve developed a strong filtering regime that sorts the wheat from the chaff.
One of the by-products of this is that I can trap all of the “bank phishing” e-mails. A new batch to Barclays and Lloyds started this morning.
As my business is the analysis of data and identification of fraud, (I provide software for people like BDO Stoy Hayward, KPMG etc.) I have analysed all of these e-mails.
My belief is that there are at least two groups out there. But judging by the pattern this is the same group that targeted the same banks about a month ago.
Interesting, another group use a software program called “The Bat!”, which I have also trapped in the filter. It does not appear very often in normal spam, except for a few pharmacies in Canada. Now this software is produced by a Moldovan company. Suspicious as this may seem, I have spoken to their UK agent and he believes that they don’t want to be involved in this and would be prepared to help in the tracking.
We are currently developing software to deep search the Internet to check the history of individuals, companies and organisations in respect to our anti-fraud work with BDO Stoy Hayward.
For historic reasons and my own stupidity, I get a large amount of spam. (Basically, I put up a lot of early web sites for my company and others, and the addresses got harvested.) They do not cause me a problem, as I’ve developed a strong filtering regime that sorts the wheat from the chaff.
One of the by-products of this is that I can trap all of the “bank phishing” e-mails. A new batch to Barclays and Lloyds started this morning.
As my business is the analysis of data and identification of fraud, (I provide software for people like BDO Stoy Hayward, KPMG etc.) I have analysed all of these e-mails.
My belief is that there are at least two groups out there. But judging by the pattern this is the same group that targeted the same banks about a month ago.
Interesting, another group use a software program called “The Bat!”, which I have also trapped in the filter. It does not appear very often in normal spam, except for a few pharmacies in Canada. Now this software is produced by a Moldovan company. Suspicious as this may seem, I have spoken to their UK agent and he believes that they don’t want to be involved in this and would be prepared to help in the tracking.
We are currently developing software to deep search the Internet to check the history of individuals, companies and organisations in respect to our anti-fraud work with BDO Stoy Hayward.
