Kenya has recently been ushered into the modern era of internet banking. A number of advertisements recently carried in the local media have praised the advantage of being able to carry out banking from the comfort of your home or office. Which is all very good.
As Kenyans rush to try out internet banking in this country and abroad, it is useful to highlight a new fraud perpetrated by dishonest persons bent on reaping where they have not sown.
Phishing is the technical term used to refer to the illegal practice by fraudsters of sending random emails to innocent persons. These emails present themselves as originating from genuine institutions, usually financial institutions, and are framed in a manner intended to con the innocent victim into revealing crucial information relating to that institution using a fake website, so cleverly built that it looks just like the authentic website.
Since the beginning of the month of February 2005, the National Centre for Research on White Collar Crime (NCRWCC) has received many fraudulent emails but with respect to financial institutions has received the following:
10 emails purporting to be from Barclays Bank, 2 emails purporting to be from Halifax Bank, 2 emails purporting to be from Abbey National PLC, 3 emails purporting to be from Regions Bank, 1 email purporting to be from HSBC Bank PLC and 1 email purporting to be from Lloyds TSB.
Phishing emails tend to have subject lines that look genuine and and attractive to the victim eg Important Banking mail, Urgent Verification Required etc
The sender of the email will normally use an address that appears to originate from the institution he is trying to impersonate eg support_id_13456@barclays.co.uk
The phishing emails will normally look genuine because the sender has used the same text and the same logo as the genuine website. Some emails will have links to the company’s genuine private policy.
In web design, it is fairly simple to mask an apparently genuine link with a fraudulent one. Fraudsters have been quick to exploit this opportunity. In this way, clicking a link on the fraudulent site reading for example http://www.hsbc.co.uk may actually lead you to the fraudsters website, reading for example http://www.fraudster.com.
Commonly, fraudsters will use forms on their fake website similar in appearance to those in the regular website, and on these forms, invite the customer to insert detailed “confirmation” of sensitive personal information, said to be for necessary verification purposes. Such information will normally relate to names, membership numbers, passwords, codes and so on, touching on institutions such as banks and credit card companies.
In many cases, clicking on any of the links on the fake website will automatically trigger a Trojan or Worm virus, sometimes referred to as spyware, to be installed on your computer. Once installed, this virus will detect, and at the fraudsters direction copy and forward personal banking information and other sensitive information including passwords to a remote computer over the internet.
Once the fraudster has received the relevant bank information and passwords necessary to operate a banking or other account over the internet, the fraudster may choose to wait until there is sufficient amount of money in the bank account before transferring and eventually withdrawing the entire amount.
Fraudsters have even been known to alter passwords, so that the genuine account holder cannot access his or her account.
Tips on how to protect yourself from internet banking fraudsters
• Ensure that your computer has a modern anti virus software installed which can detect and delete malicious code and virus such as Trojans and worms.
• Banks will ordinarily never request you by email seeking that you "verify" or "update" your password or any personal information by clicking on a weblink. Do not oblige such emails without contacting your Bank by telephone on a number that you know to be genuine.
• Ensure that your browser is kept up to date using genuine upgrades, as fraudsters always look for loopholes contained in basic browsers.
• Treat all unsolicited emails with suspicion.
• Whenever you want to operate your internet banking account, always type in the address yourself, rather than clicking on a link in order to avoid being led to a fraudulent website.
• Always look out for the locked padlock located on the internet browsers status bar whenever you are submitting sensitive personal information particularly relating to your finances. Also look for the prefix https:// before the address of the website. The absence of these features may suggest that the site is not secure.
• If in doubt about the validity of an email, or if you think that you may have disclosed information to a fraudulent site, do not hesitate to contact your bank immediately on a number that you know to be authentic
• Keep yourself frequently updated on the latest internet fraud methods as these are evolving on a regular basis
In order to be able to recognise these fraudulent emails when you see them, please find reproduced below, one such fraudulent email . - By NCRWCC Researchers, 2005
