Dangerous ANZ Bank Account Suspended Email Scam
The following email is extremely dangerous – they are phishing for your online banking log in information. It is targeted at a major Australian / New Zealand bank called ANZ. There are a number of points to consider when identifying it as a fake. Keep reading to find out more and remember to delete this email if received.
Figure A shows the email scam attempt. It is well branded and if quickly looked at can be easily fallen for. The subject line reads “Your service has been suspended for security reasons” and the sender is shown as “ANZ-Banking”, but when looking at the email address it is in no way associated with the official ANZ bank website. This email scares you by saying your account has been suspended.
The whole email is an image which means anywhere you click will lead you to the malicious website. Image emails are done so as to bypass Email Spam filters into not scanning the content of the attached image. Most Email spam filters do not have the advanced technology to use OCR techniques to decode the content of graphical attachments, so they let them through unscanned. MailShark of course has such advanced features inherent in its scanning engines.
Some points to consider when identifying this email as a scam:
- Lack of personal greeting
- Irrelevant sender email address
- The use of an image for the whole email
- Poor wording
- Unrelated destination URL (you can check a URL before clicking a link by hovering your mouse over it)
- Lack of personal greeting
- Irrelevant sender email address
- The use of an image for the whole email
- Poor wording
- Unrelated destination URL (you can check a URL before clicking a link by hovering your mouse over it)
Figure B is a screenshot of the page you will land on if you click anywhere in this email. It is a fake log in portal of the ANZ online banking service. Do not go any further – you are already at risk. This whole emails purpose is to gather your banking log in information.
If you are ever unsure of an email, contact your bank institution. This email is phishing for your log in information which can be extremely dangerous if they succeed. As usual, delete this email immediately if received!
Steph Kent
MailShark
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I think it would be better if there was an email address where we could send these scams to be investigated. Surely no one will ever get caught doing this if there is no follow up? I find it hard to understand why the only answer is — delete this email immediately.
Hi Susana. Yes good point. It’s important to note that MailShark has various reporting systems in place to report to relevant authorities all spams, scams, malware and phishing emails that are caught by the filtering systems. In the case of this ANZ scam, MailShark has an agreement with ANZ Bank with a special reporting address for all our submissions. You can rest assured everything we publish on-line has been reported and is acted upon.
For the general public however, or for people receiving such scam emails, some vendors have publicly listed email addresses on their websites you can send / forward the spam email to. Others have Web forms you can fill out attaching the spam email. Paypal, CBA, NAB all take public submissions and publish their email addresses on their websites for forwarding any scam you receive. ANZ takes public submissions through voice or by completing an on-line form.
We thank you for your comments and maybe it is an idea to include relevant public reporting addresses with each post, in case others receive such email scams and don’t know what to do with them.