Phishing emails impersonate American Express

As the Christmas season is underway, so too are a number of email phishing campaigns. One particular campaign that has intensified in the last 24 hours involves a fake American Express email, we’ve dubbed this campaign as “Phishing emails impersonate American Express”. A sample of the email is shown below.

This email is quite well crafted, but it does have one big indication that it is bogus. Mousing over the links doesn’t show www.americanexpress.com. The link instead is to a phishing site.

The email even has a link at the bottom right purportedly allowing the user to report phishing emails. Mousing over it however shows that it is a link to the phishing site.

These types of emails are stopped by MailShark email filters, but the volume of them has increased dramatically over the last 24 hours. We suspect that the Christmas shopping season may be a trigger for the start of this campaign. There may well be more campaigns starting up in the next week.

If you do receive this email, delete it.

Scott Reeves
MailShark
Free anti-spam service
Free email filter service