Bank of Ireland warns on e-mail fraud

18-03-2005

by Deirdre McArdle

A phishing scam that is targeting customers of one of Ireland's main banks, Bank of Ireland, emerged on Friday.

Bank of Ireland has warned customers not to be fooled by the scam, which takes the form of a fraudulent e-mail claiming to be from the bank. The mail indicates that Bank of Ireland has had a security breach and asks customers to follow a link to update their personal banking information. Once customers input their information, the fraudsters who run the site will use the details to gain access to customers' accounts.

After receiving a number of calls from both customers and non-customers, Bank of Ireland issued an alert advising people to ignore the mail and any future mails looking for customers to update their information via a web link. While the bank has had a high number of calls reporting the e-mail it has not yet had reports of anyone falling victim to this scam.

"We would never contact customers in this way," Anne Matthews, media relations officer with Bank of Ireland, told ElectricNews.Net. "It is important that customers know this and never respond to any of these requests for information."

The bank has confirmed that none of its systems have been compromised and that there has been no security breach of the Bank of Ireland website or the Banking 365 website.

Since sending out the alert warning people of the scam, Bank of Ireland has had the spoofed site shut down, according to Matthews, who warned that a secondary site could pop up at any time so customers still need to be wary.

On the surface the e-mail looks to be official; it uses the same logo, colours and fonts as Bank of Ireland. On closer inspection though, people will notice that the e-mail is badly written with a number of misspellings and poor grammar, often an indication of a scam mail.

To date there have few examples of such phishing scams hitting Irish banks; scammers have tended to target Irish people who participate in international payment programs using PayPal for example. This latest attack though, and a similar scam that hit AIB customers at the end of 2004, could indicate that fraudsters have identified online banking in Ireland as a new hunting ground.

"This isn't the first time this type of scam has hit the banks and it certainly won't be the last," Conor Flynn, technical director with security firm Rits, told ElectricNews.Net. "AIB and Bank of Ireland could have as many as 100,000 online customers each, if only 0.5 percent of them fall victim to these scams it's worthwhile for the fraudsters."