When you’re out to con, there is another way…

Published on 30 June 2008 in , ,

Not long ago, I reconfigured the way my email was handled – previously everything sent to a planetbods.org or a bods.me.uk email address just got lumped in together to my main email address. I’ve now separated them out, and they’re each handled separately by Google Apps.

Part of the reason was to allow me to start consolidating my email addresses – I’ve used so many over the years for different things that I just don’t know what’s what and what’s where any more, so now I can quickly and easily see what’s going where.

What has been most interesting to watch has actually been the spam situation. I do occasional trawls of Google Mail spam folders for any false positives (I went through a period of having quite a few) and one thing has been very noticeable for the last month or so.

Roughly 50% of all the spam for bods.me.uk consists of phising attempts for NatWest customers, repeated over and over and over again. Of course they’re sent to different email addresses on the domain, but then so could any spam email and it’s been interesting to notice that no other spammer or phisher is blanket-bombing the domain’s email addresses as comprehensively as the phoney NatWest crew. Well, of those that get through to my spam folder anyway.

Why NatWest I wonder? (Or even, National Westminster as some of the phishing attempts quaintly report themselves as, despite the company not having used that name for what, ten years now?) Why not Barclay’s, or Lloyds TSB or Halifax? Are NatWest’s customers particularly gullible? Or do the phishers just have no imagination?

Still, at least it makes a change from phishing attempts for US banks. I mean, if you’re trying to con people, you’re only going to make yourself look more of a prat and alert your potential conned public to the fact that it is all a con, by bombarding them with bank detail requests from organisations which they’ll never have heard of. Still, logic and cons don’t always go together…