Are you falling for fish?

MSNBC tells us that "Customers are still falling for phish".

Anti-spam firm MailFrontier Inc. showed 1,000 consumers examples of so-called "phishing" e-mail as well as legitimate e-mail from companies such as eBay and PayPal. About 28 percent of the time, the consumers incorrectly identified the phishing messages as legitimate.

What's more, the legitimate e-mails were often dismissed as potential fraud. An e-mail message from the Federal Trade Commission was dismissed as a fraud by 50 percent of the consumers.

"We knew we'd fool a few people, but we're pretty surprised by 28 percent," said Anne Bonaparte, CEO of MailFrontier. "A number of (the phishing e-mails used in the study) have been around for a while."

On a side (and only marginally related) note, PayPal sent out a note today on a class action suit that they settled. This is real and not a phishing scam.

Posted by Eric at July 28, 2004 06:29 PM | TrackBack