We are happy to take a look at a site which you think may be a fake. For example, this morning we got a message from a contributor (who unfortunately did not leave his email for us to respond):

www.postbank.nl is a fraudulent bank take note.

Normally our research team immediately investigates reported fakes. But in this case, we’re already well aware that Postbank is a legitimate financial institution, not a “fraudulent bank.”

So why might this anonymous writer believe that Postbank is a fraud? Frequently, advance fee fraud criminals will claim to be affiliated with a real bank (for example, Barclays, HSBC, Citibank, to name only a few). To help bolster that claim, they often create a web site which looks like the real bank. They’ll even set up an online account to “prove” that the $15,000,000 inheritance is sitting there just waiting for your transfer fee to release it. The small-time operators don’t have the skills to make fakes — they’ll just say

I work for Postbank, here’s their site postbank.nl, now of course this is top secret so u can not write to my work email, only to

Online articles about plane crashes, biographies of government officials, automobile manufacturers, and many more are all regularly abused by scammers claiming affiliation.

In this case, however, it’s not a confused victim who wrote us — it’s just a scammer trying to trick us into attacking a real bank. We traced his IP address and cross-referenced with a bunch of 419 spams. Luckily, aa419 is staffed by experts, not fools.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.