Harrison Thorp
Thursday, November 13, 2014 10:00 am
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Bank of America has received thousands of complaints in the last month about an email its customers have received telling them their account has been frozen and will remain so until updated information is submitted by the cardholder.
It's called fishing, according to a Bank of America agent who deals with complaints such as these on a daily basis.
The Lebanon Voice, which doesn't even maintain a credit card account, received the email on Tuesday.
Fishing in credit card fraud parlance is when scammers try to obtain credit card numbers, expiration dates and CVC codes so they can sell the numbers online or make online and phone purchases using the stolen credit card numbers.
The hyperlinks also often ask for a customer's social security number, with which scammers can open up bogus accounts and lead to identity theft.
The email's return address in this case is secure@boa.com, which, to an unsuspecting cardholder, could present a façade of legitimacy, said Kadijay S., an agent out of a Bank of America customer satisfaction center in South Carolina.
The email contains a hyperlink customers are asked to click on to update account information and unfreeze their credit card account.
Kadijah S. said this particular email shows just how sophisticated some of the fishers have become. The email shows the official Bank of America logo and includes a shaded portion in which the "important message" is displayed.
Kadijah S. said that Bank of America uses bankofamerica.com for its emails and would never include a hyperlink for the customer to click to provide account information.
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Bank of America will likely be trying to shut down the boa.com email account, she added, but that would be done by a different department and she couldn't confirm that would be the case.
She added that if there were ever a problem with a Bank of America cardholder's account, they would send an email asking them to call the number on the back of their card.