Important Fraud Alert from Citibank - Email Scam
11th January 2004

Scammers assume the role of being your protector in this scam ...

This spoof email uses just the right suggestions to encourage recipients to use the 'Click here to log in' button to check their Citibank Account. What could possibly be harmful about logging into your account and checking the balance, right? Wrong! This email uses URL Spoofing to open a forged Citibank page.

The forged page looks exactly like a genuine Citibank page, and doesn't directly ask you to provide any information. Instead, the scammers rely on you following the suggestions in the email and use the log in facility on that page.

If you do that, though, your log in details would be captured by the scammers using PHP script, while you end up at the genuine Citibank site, none the wiser.

This scam also exploits a very serious bug in Internet Explorer browsers which allows the URL (site address shown in the browser address bar) to be spoofed. This means that if you use that link, Internet Explorer browsers will open the forged page that it points to, but with the URL shown as http://www.citibank.com (see image below). However, the true URL is http://211.239.150.170 which traces back to a Korean ISP.

This bug has been increasingly exploited by email scammers of late, and we eagerly await a patch from Microsoft. The vulnerability can also allow a fake URL to be shown in the status bar of Microsoft Outlook and browser products (while holding the cursor over the cloaked link). We have set up a Browser Test cloaked link which you can use to see if your browser is vulnerable. You can also check links in emails or web pages for cloaking using our Link Checker, and you can check for URL spoofing while at a web page using our URL Checker.

If you have received this email, please remember that it is very common for these email scams to be redistributed at a later date with only slightly different content or the same but with the fake page(s) hosted by a different provider. Also, once you have received one of these hoaxes, it is also common place to receive at least another one and usually a day or two after the first, although not necessarily from the same apparent sender.

Take a good look at the following images, because this email scam may be coming to an inbox near you!

The Email ...

The fake web page...