I just got an email, supposedly from The Bank Of America. This email is telling me that my account has been locked, due to a number of invalid login attempts.

The link they've provided is of course not The Bank of America, and has been blocked by McAfee (my virus software) after having been Reported as Web Forgery!

I have also reported it to the real bank, and gotten a nice automated response from them.

I am however wondering how stupid these crooks think we are.
Haven't these scams been done to death by now, so 99.9999999999999% of the people won't fall for it.

To me, the worst part of it is the scammers seem to be piggybacking off a legitimate (Canadian) couples blog. I'd love to let them know about it, but don't see any Contact Us links. I know that I'd like to know about anyone stealing my webspace, and to get to the bottom of it.

At least a couple times a week I get bogus emails telling me that my Pay Pal account or bank account has been compromised. To me they are obvious attempts to scam me out of my login passwords and eventually my money. But the most vulnerable to these phoney alerts are the elderly or the uninformed. I have had discussions about this with my dear aging mother. Her mind is still sharp and she assures me she simply deletes the emails without impunity. But I am sure this scheme does occasionally snag some well-meaning individual or they wouldn't be so persistent. They are called 'phishing' scams.

The reason why these scams continue to be spread around is precisely because they DO work on a lot of people. With the Internet becoming easier and easier to use every day, more and more people without technical knowledge get exposed to it, and those are the best victims for those scams. Just think of all those urban legends that get passed around as fact by millions of people every day. Most of these urban legends get passed around via email forwards, and their readers accept them as fact simply because the source is supposedly known to them and trusted. Very few people bother to verify them.

Keep in mind, you tried to go to that site and it was blocked. But at this time last week, it probably wasn't blocked. And it takes all of 5 minutes to move that site to a new address, change the link in the email being sent out, and voila... a new trap that has yet to be added to the phishing lists. And all it took was 5 minutes of work and $6 for the new Internet address.