How do scammers know which bank I use?
Yeah, they’re just guessing which bank you use. The only time I’ve almost fell for it was when I was using ebay to buy some dumb shoes and five minutes later got a “fraud prevention” email. They had me going for about five seconds, but sure enough, viewing source on the HTML message clearly showed the form action went to some stupid IP address that the phisher was using to scam people.
I’d like to mention that the US American “Citizens Bank” is completely NOT the Canadian “CitizensBank” that I have raved about repeatedly. My CitizensBank is a branch of VanCity (Vancouver City) Credit Union, and is an upstanding, wholly net-only, nice bank. I’m quite certain they don’t spam.
I’ve been getting legitimate emails from my banks for as long as they have had online banking and they have never, ever sent an email wanting me to confirm anything. If they ever need to get a hold of me they call or write snail mail. Recently they have sent out emails reminding customers that they never send out such requests and when in doubt go directly to the bank’s website [don’t follow the link] or call them. In fact, I can’t think of any companies that I do business with ask me to update anything via email. If they want to update something they will do so once I’ve already logged in to the legitimate site. The spam/scam emails almost always end up in my ISP or my Mac’s junk folders. I would also hope my bank has better spelling and grammar skills than most of those spam/scam emails.
