I got an e-mail purporting to be from eTrade asking me to "verify" the bank account from which I transfer funds to my eTrade account by providing my online banking login information. This seemed suspicious to me, but upon logging into the eTrade website, I was asked to provide the same info.
Is this legit, or an extremely elaborate phishing scam?
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2 comments:
Will,
In general, Phishing (as the practice of sending illegitimate email asking for account information is called) is really on the rise. Just this morning there was a story on NPR about Microsoft (whose products make the practice easier) and Amazon sending their legal counsel after a bunch of spammers participating in the practice. However, a general good rule of thumb for avoiding such things is to simply ignore the email, and log into the etrade site directly (this prevents any links in an email from sending you to the wrong place). It is really disturbing how good the faked emails (and faked sites that the emails link you to) have started to look, so in general, following any link from an email and updating financial information is a bad idea.
OK, so I went to E*Trade (by typing the url into the browser, not clicking from the e-mail) and it seems like they are actually asking for that information.
There's some alternate, slower way to verify accounts that doesn't entail giving them log-in information. Guess I'll just do that.
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