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FSA emails to IceSave customers being filtered as spam

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  • FSA emails to IceSave customers being filtered as spam


    I take no great pleasure in being proved right (well, OK, a bit of pleasure). It did occur to me that it would be a mistake for the Financial Services Authority to email, rather than write to, accounts holders at IceSave to give details about recovery of their money.
    Because, as I write in today's paper, what are those emails going to look like? To a spam filter, they'll look something like this:
    "Kindest Sir, I have in my possession £4 billion that was seized as terrorist monies in an account in your name ready for transmission to you if you will kindly remit your details, I am grateful your reply."
    Yup. Your standard 419 scam.
    And now I've had confirmation. An email cc'd to me this morning from a (former?) IceSave account holder, and sent to pretty much anyone in the FSA (and for good measure the Treasury) points out the following:
    The email you sent to me at 19:41 hours yesterday 4th November (see below) was classed as spam by Postini (a subsidiary of Google) who provide a spam email filtering service for my email service provider (Plusnet). I find the Postini spam email filtering service to normally be very accurate and it is now very rare for legitimate emails to me to ever be classed as spam by that service, even though the odd spam email does still reach my inbox due to the endless variety of ingenious methods used by spammers to try to circulate spam filtering.
    In order for your email to have been classed as spam it was clearly sent incompetently by a mailing organisation perhaps more frequently associated with unwanted bulk spam marketing communications than with legitimate email. Can you explain who you engaged to send out these emails for you and how they have managed to send the email in such a way as to cause Postini to classify it as Spam?
    Lastly on this point can you explain why you did not send an important communication of this kind that it is essential depositors should receive by post when Icesave does have my postal address and indeed has communicated with me by post on a number of occasions during my previous time as an account holder.
    I find bureaucratic government organisations like Ofcom and the FSA normally have an overwhelming penchant for always responding to communications by email from the public by post because they seem to feel it is more official to do so but here we have an absolutely vital communication for investors being sent out by the careless and insecure method of email purely I assume because it was cheaper for the FSCS to do things this way.
    As I noted in my piece,
    that's the problem that phishing and 419 scammers pose for our financial institutions: while the latter thought they were covering themselves in glory by cooking up fabulous financial instruments (such as a mortgage-bundling bond that paid only about 2% above ultra-safe US Treasury bonds, but would go fabulously sour (NY Times: registration required to see article) if only 6% of the mortgages went sour - pretty much a given in the US in 2006, the 419ers and scammers got on with conquering our email inboxes.
    They've done this so successfully that I now assume any email purporting to come from a financial institution that makes it past my spam filters is, even so, junk.
    Anyone else seen their FSA email consigned to the spam filters?
    And of course you know what the next stage will be: phishing emails purporting to come from the FSA which will direct you to "a different site" where you'll be encouraged to enter all your IceSave details and confirm your postal address. Do not do that. The only thing worse than losing your money to the cupdity of bankers would be to lose it to the greed of phishers.
    I've asked the FSA to tell us how many emails it has sent out, and by what method. I'm also trying to get hold of the original email to see the headers; if you've received one, let us know.
    guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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