Financial E-mail Spam Soars

Financial scammers’ activities seem to be increasing in spite of effort by stakeholders in the e-payment sector of the economy to educate people on their antis. Last week, some scammers sent out e-mails to several people claiming that the message is from Interswitch, major card switching platform operator, requesting them to register their ATM cards online.
“Attention Card Holder, This is to notify you that our services are being upgraded to a new, better and more secured system . You are now required to CLICK HERE and register all your DEBIT CARDS, X-CHANGE CARDS, and CASH CARDS online IMMEDIATELY so as to enable your card to work on our new servers. Only registered cards will work with the ATM machines.
“Note that in order to continue using your card for ATM transactions, you MUST register your card(s) online IMMEDIATELY BY CLICKING HERE .If you do not register your ATM card(s) immediately, you will no longer be able to use your cards with the ATM machines or for ATM transactions and your card(s) will be cancelled or terminated.
Adhere to this instruction on receiving this message and click here immediately to register your card. Our goal is to satisfy all our customers need.
InterSwitch Nigeria Limited.”
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations reveal that the said message did not emanate from InterSwitch or any of its agents as the company is not working on its server as claimed by the scammers. More so, the e-mail address of the message is not the correct email and website of InterSwitch Nigeria.
Elsewhere, Antivirus vendor MessageLabs reports that there have been enormous finance-related spams in the first seven days of the year.
MessageLabs is part of security vendor Symantec which bought the firm last October for $695 million.
Where these spams made up 3.1 percent of all spam in the first week of January 2008, they constituted 10.2 percent of all spam in the first week of this year. These phony email spams have subject lines congratulating recipients on winning a lottery, for example.
In a related development, 419 scams, which are e-mails from senders in Nigeria seeking to fleece their recipients, often by claiming the senders have millions of dollars in bank accounts they cannot get to and offering the recipients access to those accounts in exchange for money, have become more sophisticated, said MessageLabs.
The growth in finance-related spams began during the credit crisis towards the end of last year, according to the MessageLabs 2008 annual security report.
This year is expected to be a bonanza year for cybercriminals, as governments are kept busy grappling with economic issues and economies tank during the recession.
“Spammers, particularly these spammers, are taking advantage of the poor economic climate, because people are desperate,” Matt Sergeant, senior anti-spam technologist at MessageLabs, commented.
 Such spammers tend to use hacked Webmail accounts, either through cracking somebody’s password and using that account, or creating several free Webmail accounts on Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail services, Sergeant explained.
“We’ve seen a rise in the number of fake Webmail accounts being created on all these services,” he added.
Meanwhile, the 419 spam messages have become briefer and better constructed, now requiring recipients to reply to them for additional details on monetary transactions instead of laying out all the information in the body of the e-mail.
That is because the number of 419s is increasing, Sergeant said. He predicts that the number of financial-related spams will level off and remain at about 10 percent of all e-mail because it is difficult to send as they are all manually typed in.