Are scammers really making the effort, nowadays?

This morning I received the first piece of phishing email of the year. I mean, come ON guys, it's already January 24th, and this is the best you can do?

OK, I'll admit, I've not made it easy for you, signing up to Gmail and all. Their filters are pretty damn good, so not a whole lot of your phishing scams come through any more. I haven't had a Nigerian for nearly a year, and that was a paper one (well, to my delight it was TWO) through the actual post. With an actual stamp on it! Now there - that's dedication, that is. I was so pleased, I genuinely squealed in delight.

So back to this morning's mail. An email, so not much effort already. Purporting to be from HSBC. OK - popular bank, I can give you a point for that. After all, not much point targeting Bank of America customers in the UK. Bus since HSBC owns a couple of banks in the UK, there are going to be a goodly number of people who might fall for the scam.

The subject? Well, "New Notification Alert" - it's a bit lame, isn't it? I might have been more panicky if you'd called it "Incorrect Login Attempt Notification".

Grammar? Actually that was pretty good. Look.

Dear HSBC Customer, 

Your Internet Banking security number was entered incorrectly more than 3 times.
For the protection of your account we have suspended access to it.

To restore access please Log on correctly.

Previous notifications have been sent.

 Thank you for choosing HSBC Bank.
Copyright HSBC INC 2011. All rights reserved.

It's just possible they copied from an actual bank letter. Now that shows some initiative! Usually all it takes to see through a scam is a very basic understanding of English Grammar.

But that link - that Log on link was LAME. Seriously lame. No attempt whatsoever was made to make the link look like anything more than

"http://thestorygroup.org/wp-content/FCKEditor/index.html".

Apart from "hiding" it behind the words "Log on". Hover over the link, and there it is. Click the link and your browserwill tell you -





I don't know about you, but that's pathetic.

By this time I was feeling so let down I could barely bring myself to click "Proceed anyway", but, almost out of desperation, in the hopes of a jolly good scam, I pressed onwards. The page to which the link refers isn't even there.

Scammers - I am very disappoint.