National Australia Bank has become the latest financial firm to be targeted by a fraudulent e-mail scam that attempts to dupe customers into entering personal financial information on bogus Web sites.
The bank is urging its online banking customers to ignore any e-mails requesting confidential information such as user names and passwords. The e-mail contains a link to an imitation Web site hosted in the US. The bank says the URL provided for the fake site is www.Barclayss.com.
In a statement, NAB says it contacted the Australian Federal Police and the FBI to have the fake Web site investigated and shut down.
The e-mail scam is an example of 'phishing', which uses spam e-mail to direct users to bogus Web sites in order to deceive them into giving confidential financial data.
Last week Citibank customers were targeted by an e-mail spam that threatened to shut down current accounts unless customers provided social security details at an imitation site.
Latvia's Hansabank, the Commonwealth bank of Australia, ANZ, Westpac, Bank of America and Spain's Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) have also recently been targets of Web banking scams.