FBI officials are warning users of a new phishing scam that plays off a recent round of bogus extortion threats.
The initial e-mails phishing for personal information were sent around last month, purportedly from a would-be hit man demanding users pay an extortion fee of thousands of dollars, or face death, according to an FBI advisory.
The e-mail recipients were informed the so-called hit man had been hired by their friend to knock them off, but the hit man would forgo the job as long as a payment of several thousand dollars was made, according to the FBI advisory. Users were asked to quickly respond to the bogus e-mail and provide their telephone number.
The phishing scam making the rounds this week involves an e-mail designed to dupe recipients into believing it was sent from the FBI in London. The e-mail again asks for personal information, noting a person was recently arrested for related murders of several U.S. and U.K. residents. The e-mail goes on to say the individual under arrest was found to have information about the e-mail recipient, stating that he or she was to be the next victim.
FBI officials note this second round of e-mails is bogus and advise users to disregard such e-mails unless they contains some personally identifiable information.
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I joked to my wife last year that the only thing scammers hadn't come up with was virtual murder threats. At the time, I was thinking no one would be that stupid either to believe it or to do it. This article of yours shows the actual arrogance of the cyber thieves that they can even threaten, I guess terrorist threatening of a sort, such dire consecquences and think they are immune from the authorities. I imagine the psychological damage is worse than the real damage but it emphasizes the need to take ID magically off the Internet like what we do at IDPixie LLC using patent, originally granted to EDI Secure LLLP and now assigned to IDPixie LLC on the single use credit card number using an offline device. This was granted in July 22, 2003 to a predecessor company now owned by IDPixie LLC. That patent number is US 6,598.031 B1 to Mr. Jeffrey Ice, Inventor, for "APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR ROUTING ENCRYPTED TRANSACTION CARD IDENTIFYING DATA THROUGH A PUBLIC TELEPHONE NETWORK" i.e. Internet, phones or any electronic medium in the US of A.
Posted by Abdul Tawala Alishtari on Saturday, January 20 2007 02:06 PM