Over the past week or two I've been getting emails from this "St George Bank, Credit Union Australia (CUA), and Commonwealth Financial Group" with the first two laying claim that my bank account has been accessed from an unauthorized computer. For the first two of these they read as follows:
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Dear (input either St George Bank or CUA),
We have recently determined that different computers have logged onto your Online Banking Account, and multiple password failures were present before the logons.
We need you to reconfirm your account information for us.
If this is not completed by June 15 (CUA says June 19), we will be forced to suspend your account indefinitely, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner.
To confirm your Online Banking records, click on the following link:
(in CUA's email they give) https://webbanker.cua.com.au/webbanker/cua
(in St' George Bank's) https://ibanking.stgeorge.com.au/InternetBanking/logon.jsp
Thank you,
St George Bank Customer Service
(CUA's closure reads as) Thank you for your patience in this matterm,
Credit Union Australia Customer Service
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The typo-ed "matterm" is not my own, but is in the email itself. Aside from minor differences they are identical. The entire email is a picture link, so you cant click on the link... I've no intention of following up and try that and hope none of you readers did.
But first of all, I do not bank overseas as this would point out, let alone with a bank from Australia. No doubt this is someone trying to get you to follow up and give your account information. Even the sender's email is not legitimate, and that can be discerned by the alphabet soup before the @ sign and either yahoo.com or google.com.au. IF IF this was a real bank, I'd think that their sending email would be less conspicuous.
The email from "Commonwealth Financial Group", titled as Customer Satisfaction Survey appears more benign, with no threat of alleged account closure. Below is a direct copy/paste of the message as it built like a proper email yet still has the alphabet soup email @accounts.net:
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Customer Satisfaction Survey
At Commonwealth Bank, we sincerely value your opinions. As part of our continuous improvement process, we're conducting a survey to benchmark the opinions of our customers. We will use the resulting information to better serve all of our customers
We kindly ask you to take part in our quick and easy reward survey.
In return we will credit $50.00 to your account - Just for your time!
Click here to start the survey (this is a link itself)
With the information collected we can decide to direct a number of changes to improve and expand our services.
Copyright 2009 Commonwealth Financial Group. All rights reserved.
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The first two, St George and CUA you are unable to respond to, I tried, wanting to send a rather verbose response to where they could stick it with their OBVIOUS attempt, and poor I say at that unless you bank with those groups if they are at all legit and these are people claiming to be them. The survey one would appear you can respond to it, but it wouldn't get you anywhere either.
In my email, the survey I received on the 5th, St Geroge's on the 12th and 16th, and CUA's on the 15th (actually I got 2 in a row as a double send).
If any of you have had such encounters with these "people", I urge you to share as warning to others against following up on these scams. Surely there have been a small number who have fallen for this, and I hope they managed to either bring correction to the mistake or took measures to somehow avoid further damage.
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