So, if you’re going to spam a few thousand people in a phishing attempt, maybe you might want to do a little research first. You don’t need to do much research, but maybe a little bit might make you more successful…
Take for example this message that arrived in one of my e-mail accounts this afternoon:
Welcome to AOL Customer Support
Dear valued AOL member, It has come to our attention that your billing informations are out of order.
If you could please take 5-10 minutes out of your online experience and update your personal records so you will not run into any future problems with the online service. However, any failure in updating your records will result an account suspension.
Please update your records before the 30 July 2006
Once you have updated your account records your AOL session will not be interrupted and will continue as normal . Failure to update will result in cancellation of service, Terms of Service (TOS) violations or future problems.
To update your AOL records Click here .
http://billing.AOL.com
© 2006 America Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Problem Number 1: This wasn’t sent to an AOL e-mail account! I have an old AOL e-mail account from The Wife’s days as an indentured servant for AOL, but this e-mail wasn’t sent to my AOL e-mail account… Oh Mr Fraudster, it may be time for you to GET A CLUE! If you’re not sending out your phishing message to an AOL account, then you’re probably not sending it to an AOL subscriber, which means that the chances of you getting what you’re looking for are pretty slim!
Problem Number 2: Considering the amount of publicity AOL has gotten over their hard core, cut throat, don’t take no for an answer customer retention policies, do you think that an e-mail threatening to cancel a members account if they don’t update some information is going to scare anybody?!?! Heck there will probably be subscribers who start jumping up and down yelling “I’m FREE! I’m FREE!” when they see this e-mail come in…. That is provided that the originator finally gets enough of a clue to start sending this to people who have aol.com e-mail addresses…
 Although, I’m sure some even bigger dope with a computer is going to click on the bogus link in that e-mail and enter their information, and have absolutely no idea how their identity was stolen….
