ASB Bank Issues Alert of Phishing E-mails

New Zealand-based ASB Bank has advised its clients for being watchful regarding phishing electronic mails that are masquerading as messages from the Bank, published asb.co.nz during the 4th-week of November 2011.

The mail, addressing the ASB client, informs that there's a refund the bank owes to him because of charges it debited to his account. The charges, however, were inadvertently made for which the bank regrets, while the transaction too isn't possible to be finished because of the errors within his account details. Thus, the user needs to follow a given web-link so the problem can be resolved immediately, the e-mail concludes.

One more version of the same message, addressing the client, states that ASB has deployed one fresh continuously-running server that'll maintain the accounts of all its Internet-banking clients secure. A testing of this server within the maximum number of branches across NZ has proved its efficacy; therefore, clients are requested to register to it via the web-link, the e-mail asserts.

But, in both instances, the opening of the web-links diverts users onto a phishing site, disclose the bank's officials.

Worryingly, phishing e-mails aren't solely targeting ASB Bank clients, since Kiwibank as well lately complained of fraudulent, phishing e-mails, which posing as messages from it, grew during recent weeks.

Such electronic messages inform recipients that a problem has emerged related to their accounts after which those recipients are diverted onto a false Internet site that asks for their user ID and password.

Meanwhile, Bruce Thompson Spokesman of Kiwibank stated that the phishing e-mail campaign had been circulating since sometime, while banks were fast enough towards shutting down the criminals' Internet sites. Stuff.co.nz published this on November 25, 2011.

Thompson explained that there seemed to be some deluge of the scam e-mails; however, people did have the knowledge that banks wouldn't dispatch them their URLs via such messages; therefore, the fake e-mails didn't work as usual.

Moreover, Executive Director Martin Cocker of the Internet credit card payment software provider, Netsafe stated that anti-spam filters intercepted the majority of scam e-mails while possibly the fresh phishing e-mails effectively dodged those filters. Stuff.co.nz reported this.

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» SPAMfighter News - 12/1/2011