NatWest Bank Customers Warned About Phishing Scam

A NatWest Bank branch in England is alerting customers about phishing e-mails purporting to be from the bank and trying to collect personal banking information.

A Corsham branch of NatWest Bank in North-West Wiltshire, England, has issued a warning to its customers to look out for dodgy e-mails that are causing Internet fraud, after complaints came in from several customers who received those e-mails, as reported by Wiltshire.co.uk on March 6, 2008.

The news also revealed that many Shockerwick residents, even some who do not transact with the bank, got an unexpected e-mail on March 6, 2008 about Internet banking and claiming NatWest bank as its sender.

The e-mail informed that there has been a recent modification in the online security operations of the NatWest bank, so, to keep clients protected from any illegal access or identity theft due to frauds, they are being asked to submit their personal details by accessing a certain page online.

The bank said that anyone responding to e-mails by providing his username and password, which pretends to be arrived from the bank, and requests to click a link for update of security online, is likely to suffer a loss because the bank has already alerted about the phishing scam.

The e-mail is a phishing message evident from the lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in it. When customers contacted the bank, it said that it has received many reports of these e-mails, so, it is providing one e-mail id where customers could forward the phishing e-mail.

A spokesman from Corsham branch of the bank has confirmed that the branch has received several complaints about these e-mails, known as 'phishing' e-mails in the industry, as reported by Wiltshire.co.uk on March 6, 2008.

The spokesman said that the bank never requests its customers for this kind of information via e-mail. Therefore, it urged all customers, neither to open any e-mail asking for such information nor to reply to its sender.

Moreover, recently there has been an increase in phishing scams aimed at banks. For instance, Ukraine-based Raiffeisen Bank had been subject to a phishing scam on March 6, 2008. In that attack too, the e-mail to the bank's clients lied that the bank had modified its Internet security system thus, requiring them to update their private information.

Related article: NatWest Bank, the Most Targeted Brand for Phishers

» SPAMfighter News - 3/15/2008