Elderly Man Victimized with Phishing E-mail Fraud

A resident aged 73, of Grosse Pointe city in Michigan, USA reported getting a scam e-mail that even victimized him, published GrossPointePatch during the end-week of October 2011.

Informing police authorities, the elderly stated that the e-mail directed him to provide his password along with his contacts' e-mail ids. And when he gave the information asked, he started getting e-mails his family and friends sent, enquiring about his well-being.

These relatives and friends told the man that e-mails reached them from his id stating that during a physical tussle inside London city, he'd got wounded and so required cash to be wired for him at a particular address of a particular individual.

Incidentally, authorities probing the situation explained about such scams as being difficult to investigate, since people behind them were typically from foreign countries where they set up fake accounts for extracting private details from those they victimized. GrossPointePatch published this.

Disturbingly according to security researchers, the Grosse Pointe inhabitant had been victimized with an e-mail hack as well as the notoriously known "London" e-mail fraud.

This specific electronic mail scam is different in that the fraudsters have managed to infiltrate the account of the victim following gaining access to his password, invade the address book of that person followed with dispatching the fraudulent e-mails (to the relatives and friends). But since the e-mail recipients have a close connection with the victimized individual i.e. the Grosse Pointe resident, they're more likely, in contrast to strangers, for getting deceived with the message, falsely originating from him and thereby getting them to wire cash to the criminals.

Moreover, incase a few e-mail recipients respond carefully, cunning scammers may as well go through the messages in the e-mail account of the victim, get further information regarding him, as also subsequently utilize that information for dispatching persuasive responses that could enhance their scope for defrauding additional contacts of the victim into wiring cash, the researchers elaborate.

Thus for preventing such scams, police authorities and security specialists urge end-users for selecting complicated e-mail passwords that aren't easy-to-guess. Further, those passwords must be altered every month, they recommend.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/11/2011