I feel like the fraudsters are getting more and more clever as they imitate actual financial institutions in their emails in an effort to get you to click on their link and enter your username and password.
Recently I received an email purportedly from the Capital One Fraud Monitoring Department telling me they’d identified activity on my card that “appears to fall outside your typical spending pattern” and they’d placed a temporary hold on my card.
Here’s what that email looked like.
It looks authentic at first glance and I could see someone clicking on it. In my case, while I do have a Capital One credit card, it has a zero balance and I haven’t used it for nine months. That was enough to make me suspicious of the email. (Another clue was the sketchy punctuation and capitalization.) So I clicked on Capital One in the From portion of the email and saw that it was not from Capital One but rather “capitalone-janine@yale.edu.” That confirmed it was a phishing scam so I deleted the message (after taking the screenshots for this blog post).
It seems especially evil to fraudulently tell people they might be the victims of fraud.
More skilled phishermen would have spoofed the from email more effectively. So a good rule of thumb is to never click on emails like these but rather open your browser, go to the institution’s website and sign in. If they have an authentic message for you, you’ll find it there.
One of the benefits of YNAB is that we’re keeping close tabs on our money (and on our money-related email). Be vigilant when you read those emails so that you don’t fall prey to these scammers!
Leave a Reply