Bogus bank emails doing the rounds

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 25: Fraudulent emails, this time purporting to come from the Bank of Butterfield, are in circulation around the island.

This type of fraud is called ‘phishing’— an attempt to acquire information, such as usernames and passwords, by pretending to come from a trustworthy and reliable source — in this case your bank.

There will be many people out there, including this writer, who have received these type of e-mails and have stopped and wondered whether they were genuine.

The Bermuda Sun received the following advice from a Butterfield spokesperson on how we should deal with this type of attempted fraud:

“Butterfield is aware and wishes to advise our customers that fraudulent, ‘phishing’ e-mails purporting to be from the Bank are currently being sent to Bermuda residents.

“These e-mails are written by criminals seeking to obtain customers’ online banking credentials for purposes of accessing and stealing funds from accounts.

“Butterfield will never ask customers for personal information or account details via e-mail or use e-mail to direct them to a website to ‘update’ or ‘unlock’ their online access.

“If customers receive an e-mail requesting that they visit a website to update their account information or unlock their accounts, they should disregard it and delete it; it is fraudulent.”