Phishing for Everything They Can Get

I have an email address that I never use. It’s on a few Web pages, but I’ve never used it to create any accounts or as a contact address for anything at any time. In fact, I pretty much only check it these days to see what entertaining spam might appear.

This arrived in my inbox yesterday:

Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by (Account.Update.@msnn.com) on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 09:59:45 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- : We Here at MSN, are sorry to inform you that we are having problem's with the billing information on your account.(XBOX Live, MSN Hotmail, Verizon,) We would appreciate it if you would go to our website and fill out the proper information that we need to keep you as an MSN member.

Please Update your account information by visiting our updates web site below.

<a href="http://members.lycos.co.uk/verizoncellphone/msnlive"> verizon updates</a>

Steve. Updates Center Account Team. .550268889550268889

Seemed like a run of the mill phishing email, complete with weird punctuation, random use of uppercase letters, and a ‘close but no cigar’ From address — Account.Update@msnn.com. Anyone with a half a clue would see that extra N and know it was fake, right?

The failed attempt to embed the link in the body of the email is pretty funny too — I mean, even if somebody didn’t catch on that this was bogus before they saw that, they’d know that Verizon would not use a lycos.co.uk domain, right? Right?

Of course, I went to the site. Here’s what it looks like. Note the misspellings, and the sheer gall of these people to ask for two credit card numbers, a state ID (driver’s license?) number, social security number, mother’s maiden name, bank account numbers, email address and password…

It saddens me that somebody somewhere has probably lost a lot of money because of this.

Update: I reported this site to Lycos Tripod yesterday, and when I checked it today they had already taken it down.

Bogusbilling