Bank of America phishing scam

Phishing emails purportedly coming from Bank of America are nothing new – every now and then scammers roll out a slight variation on the previous one, and this latest is no exception:

ScanSafe reports that the link provided for signing in to online banking points to a gramsbbq.org/bain (a website belonging to barbecue establishment in California), which in turn automatically redirects the users to the phishing page which is hosted on chasingarcadia.com – another legitimate, but compromised, site belonging to a Canadian band.

The use of compromised sites for redirecting and hosting phishing pages is a technique successfully used by many scammers, since it allows the emails to bypass reputation filters and community-based trust reporting.

On the positive side, these scams are easily detected – if you know what to look for. Positioning the cursor on the link reveals that the domain it points to is not the official domain of the bank. And if you follow the link, the URL in the address bar (http://www.chasingarcadia.com/channel/safe.sslbankofamerica.com/index.htm) will tell you the same.