Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Phishing

Yesterday I got an email from my bank from the fraud alert department notifying me of a phone number change on my account. The only problem was that I'm not the person named in the account and the account number mentioned is not mine. I immediately suspected it was a phishing scam and looked up the email address for the fraud unit online and forwarded the email along to them. I hovered over all of the links in the email and they appear authentic, and the next step was doing a reverse phone number look up on the toll free number they listed as who to call if this was not an authorized change - the phone number look up returned no results.

I did all of this Monday morning and it is now Tuesday evening and I have still not received a response from the bank. My concern at this point is that the bank accidentally emailed me another customer's account information, and more to the point, that they have possibly emailed my account information to someone else. How long should I wait for a reply before forwarding the email to the Better Business Bureau, closing all my accounts, and moving my money elsewhere? It's hard for me to believe that a bank would make that kind of mistake, but if it's not a phishing scam, then what other explanation is there?

No comments: