Day: September 15, 2014

This one almost got me.

I used to have a toll road account.

I closed the account a while back, in part because I wasn’t using it, but mostly because the toll road people kept screwing up my account.

It’s because the toll road people habitually screwed up their accounting that I almost got screwed by this phishing email.

I was tired when the email came in, since it wasn’t unusual for the toll road people to bill me 6 or 9 months late for some bullshit infraction; I opened this mail.

The toll road people would always claim they’d tried to contact me, which was a flat out lie. The only contact I’d get is a threat via US mail saying unless I corrected XYZ from 6-9 months ago they were going to drag me into court.

I thought it would be ironic that now they’d send me an email after the account had been closed for quite some time.  So I clicked on the display invoice link.

Thankfully I clicked on it using my iPad. The blank page caused me to pause, at which point I noticed that the URL indicated a .fr ( French) domain. I realized I’d almost been suckered.  After a few seconds I got this nice message saying that my OS wasn’t compatible.

Weird! A polite virus or malware, who’d have thought?

In any case I thought it worthy of mentioning to the world to be on the lookout.

Then it occurred to me that my susceptibility to this phishing email was predicated on a legitimate service and their poor customer satisfaction, or their incompetence.  

This suggests that any company who is renown for poor service and unhappy customers could easily be used as a trojan horse.

I think the lesson here may be:

1) Make sure that we only accept paper mail communications from our utilities, services, and banks.

OR

2) We hold these entities to a high standard of customer support and never them get away with being sloppy in their dealings with us. Which means that we beat the stuffing out of these companies when they make mistakes.

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An interesting point, I’ve found in my highly unscientific sampling, that I can’t remove email addresses from some of my accounts.