Phishing email

[kwicky]

Today I received an e-mail from the Halifax to suspend me from accessing my online account unless I confirmed my banking details by going to https://www.halifax-online.co.uk/ mem bin/formslogin.asp I have been informed that this is a Phishing E-mail fraud. I was told they hide their real address behind that above. I would like to get into HTML to see what this address is. How do I go about this? I have IE7 and use Mozilla Thunderbird.

[mattie]

To be honest I would just visit the real Halifax website and see if they have an email address to forward this type of email to.

I would then add the sender to a blocked senders list, or mark it as spam then delete it, and then forget about it, as you will likely get more.

[peanut]

Not only can you get the ip adress but you can find out almost exactly where in the world it is too!!! Go to start, run, type in the letters "cmd" no qoutations. then when the command prompt window opens type in "tracert" then a space then the web address and hit enter. Write down the final address and go to www.ip-adress.com and put that address in the box. yes that website has only one d in address it was not a typo. This will work with any address. You may have to disable your firewall for a minute when you are in the cmd prompt window for it to get the final ip address of the website so don't forget to turn it back on.

[peanut]

Just tried it myself and it made a liar out of me. They must be covering themselves up somehow. Try it with other sites, its really cool. And it even gives you an arial map of the location.

[Oneeyedvic]

two things:

Firstly, do not block the email address as it is in all likelihood a real email address from Halifax.

Secondly, the IP address link isn't much cop. I just put in my IP address (I have a fixed IP address) and it came up with an address round 150 miles away.
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I would echo the thought of forwarding it on to Halifax though.

[vehelpfulguy]

Dont believe oneeyedvic above.

This is NOT a real e-mail address from Halifax.

[Oneeyedvic]

From my hosting company:

Unfortunately it is trivial for anyone to use your email address as the sender (from) address for mail messages. They don't need to send the mail via our servers, and there is little you can do to stop them. This is happening more and more because most ISPs now block mail that doesn't come from a valid address, and many mark as spam mail from obviously fictitious addresses at hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. Consequently many spammers now find domain names from the WHOIS database and use these to make plausible looking 'from' addresses for the email they send.

In addition, many of the current viruses use fake 'from' addresses in the virus infected mails they send out once a machine has become infected. Usually they use addresses gleaned from the computers address-book and recently received emails, so if you are receiving virus infected mails, you might find they are coming from someone you know.

This can become a serious problem when spammers use your address as the 'from' address in bulk spam email, in that you may receive many bounce messages from any invalid addresses they send the spam to. Unfortunately it isn't easy for us to block this mail, but as the from address on the mail will probably be a fictitious recipient at your domain, you might be able to block these coming to you by not using the 'postmaster' (catchall) recipient, but this is only an option if you have a forwarding or hosting account.

The point is that if you if you use a "add sender to block"list, the email address that you might block could be a genuine Halifax addres

[kwicky]

The fact that this scam has been going on for many months it seems futile to contact the Halifax website. I also thought IE7 with up to date patches and Thunderbird had phishing filters, why did they not pick this up?

[peanut]

Oneeyedvic,

You in all likelihood have your ip address hidden. I have not tried putting in an ip address without using tracert to find it. If you have a router with a firewall, I don't think that website will work for you.