British Embassy Cautions Expatriates Following Increasing E-mail Frauds

The Embassy of Britain in Madrid has released one security alert for all residents following an increased number of e-mail frauds and counting against expatriates, published costa-news.com during the 3rd-week of February 2012.

Actually, at the start of February 2012, media exposed one particular e-mail scam wherein the scammers, disguised as representatives of HMRC (Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue) the tax-collecting office of UK, asked expatriates to provide their banking details so they could be sent a so-called income-tax discount valuing some hundred pounds.

Currently, one quite the same kind of scam e-mail is targeting residents posing as a message from AEAT (Agencia Tributaria) the tax agency of Spain, officials discovered.

Hence, officers from the Embassy are cautioning recipients of such scam e-mails that they mustn't under any situation reveal their credit card or banking information. Besides, neither AEAT nor HMRC will ever request for the stated sensitive and confidential information over e-mail.

In addition, the Embassy of Britain alerted expatriates of one more kind of e-mail fraud, which's targeting them.

Worryingly, the Consular member-staff too recently became a target of the "Stranded Overseas Scam" wherein an attacker compromises the e-mail account of the victim and from there dispatches disturbing messages to all the contacts in that account, imploring to transfer money immediately.

Basically, for doing the compromise, the attacker first dispatches one message to that e-mail account-owner masquerading as the latter's ISP or e-mail service provider, while directing him to submit his password and log-in details for his account. There's also a threat incorporated that if the details are not given then the person's e-mail account will be suspended.

Eventually, when the hijacker cum scammer acquires the log-in information, he uses the related account to dispatch one special message to all the relatives/friends of the account-owner giving the excuse of the latter getting mugged off money, cell-phone etc., and therefore requires cash for purchasing an air-ticket for homeward journey.

Conclusively, anyone getting this kind of e-mail must use alternate modes-of-communication such as the telephone and directly get in touch with the person seeming to be in trouble and find out the actual situation, officials urged.

Related article: British Telecommunications Introduces New anti-spam System

» SPAMfighter News - 2/28/2012