If you find an e-mail in your in-box today claiming to be from Bend Broadband and instructing you to send your username, password and phone number “to enable us carryout [sic] an urgent maintenance in your e-mail account” – don’t.
“BendBroadband wishes to inform you that there is a congestion [sic] in your Chesapeake.Net e-mail account,” the e-mail says. “This is due to the spam activities going on in the Internet. You have been contacted personally so that you can confirm your account to avoid losing it to Internet spam.”
It concludes: “BendBroadband Technical Support Unit is opened [sic] for Technology, Help, Information, Support, resources. etc. Thank you for your understanding. We apologize for any inconveniences this may have cause [sic] you!”
A recorded message at Bend Broadband tech support says the e-mail is a scam and warns customers not to reply to it. It looks like a phishing attempt, and judging by the grammatical mistakes and strange sentence constructions I’d guess it was written by somebody who isn’t a native speaker of English.
This article appears in Oct 22-28, 2009.
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BendBroadband is aware of the phishing attack and took action early today to ensure that no customer response (if any) would be allowed past our internal network. All high speed customers will receive notice of the attack via our messaging system. When these attacks occur (which is thankfully rare due to our use of Iron Port) we use the situation to remind customers that they should never respond to an unknown email asking for personal information and that BendBroadband will never request such information via email.
Best regards
Thanks for the additional info, John.