Beware Customers of Bank of America!

I get more junk mail in my Yahoo e-mail than I care to mention. After signing up for free offers including magazines, samples, and other things that end up collecting dust around the house, junk e-mail was a natural side effect. But when I saw an e-mail from Bank of America, I decided to open it and see what they had to say. They informed me that I needed to log-in to my account and update my personal information. They further told me that not complying to this urgent update within 72 hours would result in me losing my account.

I was taken aback. A threat? From a bank I had trusted for well over a decade? Was this what customer service has boiled down to? Something smelled and this time it was not me. Conveniently located at the bottom of the e-mail was a link, supposedly to Bank of America. I clicked on it, being brought to a site that to any seeing eye, was a perfect replica to the Bank of America site. It was the exact carbon copy, word by word, graphic by graphic. But being a distrustful fellow, I decided to do research, before providing my trusted bank information.

Firstly, the website name was not just Bank of America. After the usual www.bankofamerica.com, was what appeared to be a paragraph of letters and numbers unfamiliar to me. Sure, the site contained the familiar insignia I have come to know and trust, but the web address left me scratching my head. Did the homepage always have that much gobbledygook at the end?

No way.

What I discovered, after typing in "Bank of America fake e-mail" into Yahoo's search engine was that I was one of thousands, perhaps millions that had almost fell for a large phishing scam. One that could have stolen my account information, and used the precious few dollars I have saved over a short lifetime. I learned that Bank of America is a popular target for "Phishers," or people who set up renegade websites to appear much like a banks, only to rob honest and unfamiliar folk of their passwords and livelihood. These phishing individuals send out millions of e-mails to regular Joe's attempting to lure their unsuspecting prey to their "trap website."