Phishing Expedition
Category: Society & Culture...
Posted Tuesday, May 31, 2005 at 08:33 PM [GMT-6]

The website of Chicks on Speed Records is a mish-mash of styles, combining pixelated punk rock, paper bag and lo-fi grunge* in a manner that succeeds in keeping user-friendliness inversely proportional to the obscurity of the "artists" found therein. I suppose there are a thousand clones on the web, if one cares to look for them.

But what sets Chicks on Speed apart is this very interesting little enticement. It appears that peddling recordings of dubious merit isn't sufficiently phattening COSR's bank account, so it's decided to go into the banking business itself. Its Bank of the West phishing page is authoritatively styled and has the rather ironic headline of "Protect Yourself Against Financial Fraud!" (It still contains various grammatical errors that should tip off a visitor, even if he or she failed to notice the bogus URL.) The relevant question is whether this attempt to illegally capture ATM card numbers and PINs is being done with the knowledge of the site's German-based owners.

Here's the text of the email that attempts to pull visitors to the site.

At the Bank of the West, we take protecting your financial information seriously. We recognize and respect your right to privacy when it comes to your personal financial information. Please attend to our request to our active consumers to protect them of online fraud and frequent rising scam attacks against our financial institution.

Actually, we are performing security improvements of our banking community and enforce customers to register their sensitive information for an additionally created free security service to prevent any fraudulent activity against their assets and savings. We, hereby ask you to respond within few hours of current notification and complete security application form via our SSL protected website to apply for this service absolutely for free, otherwise your account(s) may not process posted transactions correctly and on time.

Please visit us to apply http://www.bankofthewest.com/?register=aSODJ3

Feel free to pass along this URL to whatever law enforcement authorities you are most conversant with.

*As defined in "Fresh Styles for Web Designers"

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Comments

Hey, Eric! Off topic, but you've been tagged. *grin*

(That is, if you don't spurn memes. . .)

http://www.tulipgirl.com/mt/archives/000716.html

Posted by: TulipGirl at June 1, 2005 08:58 PM
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