I got home from work today to find 12 e-mails waiting for me.

7 were just spam/advertising
Of those 3 were what I would call dodgy – software for 20% of the list price, or obscure mails with just a link to a geocities URL

3 were fraudulent phishing attempts – two purporting to be from the Alliance & Leicester and one supposedly from Barclays.

1 was probably a genuine e-mail from Egg.com but I treat any e-mails from banks to be potentially fraudulent and never click on a link in them on principle.

1 was a real, proper e-mail from another human being who I know.

The ‘Barclays’ e-mail was worrying. It looked very convincing compared to the usual attempts. In its first paragraph it even said:

Some customers have been receiving an email claiming to be from Barclays advising them to follow a link to what appear to be a Barclays web site, where they are prompted to enter their personal Online Banking details. Barclays is in no way involved with this email and the web site does not belong to us.

That could easily fool someone not in the habit of checking the headers on e-mails, and who didn’t spot the ‘s’ missing from the end of ‘appears’.

They were doing quite well until the PS which started: “We have asked few additional information which is going to be the part of secure login process.”

So the old rule of thumb still applies – if an e-mail looks like it has been translated from another language using Babelfish then its a fraud!

The other dead giveaway is a URL listed in the mail, which displays a totally different destination in the status area at the bottom of Outlook. I did a trace of who the domain belonged to, found that it is registered to a gospel news organisation in the US and forwarded the mail to them.