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420,000 Scam E-mails Sent Every Hour In UK Alone
An anonymous reader writes "More than 420,000 scam e-mails are sent every hour in the UK, according to a report by CPP, which estimates that Brits were targeted by 3.7 billion phishing e-mails in the last 12 months alone. A quarter of us admit to falling victim to e-fraudsters, with the average victim losing over GBP285. Fake banking e-mails are the most common method used by criminals, with 55% of those targeted receiving seemingly legitimate e-correspondence from high street banks."
Not spam, phishing.
I used to receive barely literate mail shots, with my bank's domain in the "From:" field. Tracking back the IP revealed that the sender was a 3rd party with a domain registered to a caravan (trailer) park.
When I reported this to my bank as either a phishing attempt, or breathtakingly bad practice on their part, I got a snotty reply saying that this was a genuine mailshot via a 3rd party, and that this (by which they implicitly meant "faking headers") was standard practice. They genuinely could not understand why I had a problem with them sending out exactly the sort of faked email that they were regularly warning me about.
Needless to say, I changed banks shorty afterwards, but the lesson is that the line between legit and fraudulent is thin and wiggly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.