what have we come to?

Frank Fusco

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Mountain Home, Arkansas
We have an account with the Wells Fargo Bank company. Last week my wife got an e-mail, supposedly from them, that looked suspicious. Among other things, it asked for our account number. Plus, the only e-mail address on the account is my primary. Hers is a Yahoo address.
Without clicking anything in it, she tried to forward to me so I could check it out. Yahoo (it ain't all bad) would not let her resend and gave a warning message that something wasn't right.
So, she printed it out and gave to me.
I called WF and after much time and being switched through four departments finally got to their fraud/security people. I explained the situation. They asked me to forward the message to them. I explained (several times) that it would not forward and I was reluctant to try. I said I would mail them a paper hard copy.
The response......hold on for this........"we don't have he capabilities to receive or process paper copies". :eek:
Comes close to the 'now I have heard everything' cliche. But, I know the weirdo machine never stops producing.
BTW, I told them to forget it. Glad we are alert enough to recognize a scam/phish/whatever. And, thanks Yahoo for your automated catch on that one.
 
Frank the images that spring to mind with a totally digital world. So what happens if one day the security branches of the USA get to become paperless, but no one tells the bad guys and they still use paper maps and paper notes. Seems like they would get away with anything they like then and when the whole thing goes up in smoke some civil servant would be before congress and saying well we had no way to process it see we have been digital and paperless in terms of that there new green policy for the last 10 years.:rofl::rofl:

Never mind the microdots etc from the past.:rofl:

Maybe there is a message there about which bank to use.
 
The result makes sense, but they could have put it a little better. A printout of an email is pretty useless when it comes to tracking down a scam like this.

Unless you printed every single header and the source code of the email, they wouldn't really be able to do anything with that sheet of paper. They could have said it better, but it's a pretty geeky subject and maybe they just did a poor job of saying so.

It's interesting that Yahoo blocked you from forwarding it - It makes sense, if a little overzealous. As you've seen, it makes giving it to someone who can do anything about it a bit of a challenge. I don't use my Yahoo account, but if there was a way to save the email to a file, then maybe you could forward it as an attachment.

They coulda done a better job sayin' it ... but a printout wouldn't have done me any good in hunting down a scammer. Ya need IP addresses and such, not the contents of the email. :)
 
Jason's right, a printout would be completely useless to them. Not only that, but I'm sure they've seen by now hundreds of examples of this particular message. And I don't blame yahoo for blocking people from forwarding phish like this. We get hit all the time, and no matter how often we tell people we would NEVER ask for their username or password, 4 or 5 out of 6,000 still give it up. It's enough to drive one crazy... ;)

Thanks,

Bill
 
OK, they aren't nuts.
But, I'm still miffed.
Can I say "miffed" here? :eek:

I suppose you can Frank. ;)

If their Infosec team is like ours, they may know their job very well and would be "Johnny on the spot" if someone were trying to do something, they're not really trained to work with the general public. Their answer makes perfect sense to another techie type person but is rather unfriendly to anyone else.

Our infosec team consists of a guy that runs around wearing dragon shirts and deck shoes, a lady that couldn't be nice if her life depended on it. Ask them to track down bad e-mails like this though and I couldn't think of a better team for the job.
 
Smart catch there Frank... I get emails periodically from my "bank" that tells me my account may have been breached or accessed or some similar wording... it's usually from some "bank" I either never heard of, or do not have an account with, including WF which I closed about 5 years ago when I moved up here. My local bank is a little stand alone bank that is too small and I guess flies under the radar of the spammers...
 
Smart catch there Frank... I get emails periodically from my "bank" that tells me my account may have been breached or accessed or some similar wording... it's usually from some "bank" I either never heard of, or do not have an account with, including WF which I closed about 5 years ago when I moved up here. My local bank is a little stand alone bank that is too small and I guess flies under the radar of the spammers...

We have a situation where I am locked into WF, like it or not.
But, in this case, I probably shouldn't be knocking WF. The problem was with the spammers/scammers/phishers/jerkers/whatevers and the fact that the WF computer security guys don't speak non-geek English.
Glad my wife caught it. I think she is tired of hearing me scream at her "Don't click anything".
 
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