Phishers Target Students in Spam Campaign

A new hoax is circulating across the internet, this time the victims being unknowing college students who require a loan in order to start a new year at the university.

According to Sophos, students receive an email from Directgov UK, in which they are told that a problem has emerged regarding their student loan.

The purpose of this email is to obtain personal data from the victims, which could later be used to steal from their bank accounts.

The received email message is short and it doesn't give the person much information about what the problem is. They just mention that the log-in details are incorrect and that they need to be updated.

An HTML form attached to the email contains a number of fields which will give phishers access to a large part of the private data collection related to the student loan account.

A technology consultant from Sophos says that their products should mark these types of messages as being spam and the webpage that receives the personal info is blocked.

On the other hand, these types of Internet scams test yet again our level of trust. Most banking and other companies who handle payments already have massive marketing campaigns in which they urge customers not to give out any sensitive information to anyone, as company officials have a strict policy about these matters and they never request any of your personal details.

A close look upon these text or email messages can give away their true purpose. For instance, the above mentioned hoax has a grammatical error in the body of the message, which should be easily recognized by a future student. Also, most of these messages have a similar error or they contain false information that will give us a clue of the real intent of the sender.