Probably most people have received email account phishing scams by email.
In other words, an email which claims to be from the ISP or the email service
provider which says, basically, that your email account will be closed if you
don't reply with your account name and password. (I have received many times
a version which was machine-translated to Finnish, and was almost illegible
and completely hilarious.)

  What I don't understand is: What's the point? What do they need people's
email accounts for? If they need email accounts for whatever scamming they
want to do, there are dozens and dozens of free email services out there,
starting from hotmail and gmail. What do they need people's existing accounts
for?

  I have actually been tempted to reply to one of those phishing emails
asking that very question. Of course I won't receive an answer, so there
wouldn't be any point in doing so. Pity.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/06/09 09:35, Warp wrote:
>    What I don't understand is: What's the point? What do they need people's
> email accounts for? If they need email accounts for whatever scamming they
> want to do, there are dozens and dozens of free email services out there,
> starting from hotmail and gmail. What do they need people's existing accounts
> for?

	Let's take a step back.

	For a while, most such ones I got were from sites pretending to be 
Paypal. I'm sure you can understand the reason for wanting /that/.

	Now if I get access to someone's email account, chances are somewhere 
in there he'll have emails from places like Paypal that contain the 
username and password.

	It's likely just an indirect way to get to other sites.

	Also, many people use the same username and password. So if they get 
your email's, they'll try it with other services.


-- 
Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright 
ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little 
sign of breaking down in the near future.

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On Sun, 06 Dec 2009 16:35:17 +0100, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> What do they need people's existing accounts for?

Because they can then gain access to other online accounts by using the "I  
forgot my password; email it to me" feature that many sites have.

Also, some people may have sensitive/valuable information (passwords,  
account numbers et.c.) in their email database, especially the kind of  
people who might fall for a phishing scam.



-- 
FE

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