BBB Wary of Phishing E-mail Scam

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has issued an urgent scam e-mail alert threatening business and consumers on receiving anxious calls from business owners, reported htrnews on 29 March, 2012.

The scam e-mail uses the name of BBB in issuing a threat to business owners and highlights about receiving several complains regarding many unauthorized transaction from several private bank to the concerned account of the corporate. In a more reliable note, the e-mail ended by providing a link to the online center that highlight all complaints.

The e-mail also includes a derogative link and scooped a sign-in information, as published in the news release. In actual, the BBB does not acknowledge or send grievances regarding private financial transaction with a bank.

The subject line of the fake e-mail might differ, as accorded by the BBB. According to them, the subject line by BBB begins with "The better business needs your immediate response", 'the better business bureau dispute resolution and 'The Better business bureau investigation', amongst others.

Saying about the e-mail scam, BBB President, Tom Bartholomy commented that although these e-mails look genuine, they are not being sent from the BBB. It can be very difficult for a business to identify the genuine e-mails by BBB from the fake ones, in a statement published by wsoctv on March 29, 2012.

According to the BBB, over the past few months, scammers are trying to fulfill their aim of sending millions of scammed e-mail in the name of BBB. Bartholomy commented that taking big names and names of famous organizations makes a mail more reliable.

However, the BBB recommended the following tips for discriminating scammed e-mails. Primarily one should look for typos, grammatical errors, etc in the text that indicates the place of origination of the e-mails. Secondly, one can hang around their mouse over the link to find out the actual destination of the link if it signifies bbb.org address. Last but not least, one can just copy and paste the link to a Notepad (not Word). As notepad is not supported by HTML, the real link will be displayed.

Moreover, the BBB states that a recipient of such e-mails could disregard the message and forward the information to phishing@council.bbb.org and then completely delete the fake mail. Besides, users who might have clicked on the link unknowingly should do a virus scan immediately suggested the BBB.

Related article: BBA Outlines Steps To Ward Off Online Fraud

» SPAMfighter News - 4/10/2012