Spam Gallery–Security System Updates

The Spam Gallery is a series of posts that give examples of spam messages, explaining telltales signs of how they are spam.

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This email tries to use terms that sound current.  News reports may be mentioning FDIC more often with the recent banking problems,  but a lot of people may not realize what an ACH transaction is.  The general fear the spam is trying to evoke is that you will not be able to do any bank transfers until you apply a security patch to your computer.

To think this through, why would an update to your computer help anything?  Your computer is not involved in financial transfers.  Those transactions happen between banks.  Even if this were legit – and it isn’t because the FDIC has no part in managing transfers – it would be a patch your bank would need to make to its computers.

Look closely at the language.  When would a company ever use the closing “Faithfully yours”?  That is very inappropriate language for business.  Moreover, the general grammar and terminology is poor.  There is no proper use of the phrase “update your security version”.  Also, the email address is not from the fdic.gov email domain.

Pay close attention to who the email is from.  If it’s a person, it’s probably not an email representing an organization.  Businesses have specific email address that they use to send bulk communication from.

A variant:

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