Online Scammers Hacked E-mail Account of ACMES Personnel Director

Patricia Arnold, Personnel Director of Aransas County Emergency Medical Services (ACMES) - located in Rockport, Texas (US) - e-mail account has been hacked. Somebody is dispatching fraudulent messages from the account to the addresses on her contact list.

The cunningly crafted e-mail shows that Arnold apparently writing with tears in her eyes. The e-mail states that she and her family, who had come to London on a vacation, robbed near the hotel they were staying in. Arnold seemingly reported to the police and visited the embassy there, but they declined to help them instead told her that she and her family must wait for 21 days that was impossible to follow.

Continuing further, Arnold supposedly writes that she and her family has only 3-hrs for their flight to home, but due to the shortage of money, they're finding it difficult to clear the hotel expenses. Therefore, she requires an urgent loan, the e-mail urges.

Arnold became aware of the fraud when her friends called her whom she then assured that she wasn't in London.

Unfortunately, one of Arnold's friends trusted the e-mail replied back asking the address to which she could wire the money. Consequently, she had lost her money to the fraudsters.

Security researchers stated that the above kind of e-mail scam surrounds the "stranded abroad" tactic attempted at exploiting recipients' sympathy. Typically, the e-mails posed as a message from some 'pal' in financial distress and stuck in a foreign country. Furthermore, such types of scam e-mails were becoming more-and-more prevalent as the usage of the Internet grew daily, the researchers highlighted.

Thus, they (security researchers) suggest the general public that if anyone gets an e-mail apparently from a relative or friend saying that he/she is stranded abroad and needs cash, that person should first contact his/her relative/friend over the phone and know about his/her friend's whereabouts.

Suppose the relative/friend cannot be contacted over phone, then it is necessary to confirm the e-mail sender's genuineness by asking him a few personal questions through mail. If the sender is genuine, he'll reply correctly, but if he's a fraud, the answers will be different and that will help to know whether the relative/friend is actually facing a serious problem.

Related article: Online Card Fraud Shows Greater Tendency Than Chip and Pin

» SPAMfighter News - 6/8/2010