"Mailbox Quota Exceeded." Sure it is...

Here's a new scam that arrived in my work email this morning.  The message read,

"Mailbox Quota Exceeded

Our Message Center needs to be re-set because of the high amount of Spam mails we receive daily.
We have re-set our server to serve you more better and consistently; Please click the link below to re-set your mailbox to the new server."

It then listed a link where I was supposed to "re-set" my mail server.  

Of course it's a scam; the phrase, "to serve you more better," is a dead giveaway.  According to About.com, it's a phishing scam.  The scammers would have you believe that resetting a mail server involves giving them your user name, password and birth date.

And yet people fall for this stuff all the time.  North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper announced just today that scammers had stolen $100,000 from victims with this simple text message, "GATEWAY BANK ALERT: Your CARD starting with 4138** has been DEACTIVATED."

According to a 2009 study by cyber security firm Trusteer, phishing scams have a very low success rate.  Less than 1/10th of one percent of scam email recipients actually respond to the phony email.  But of those that do visit the phishing site, nearly half submitted personal information like passwords and user names.

Links:

About.com's article on the scam

Scam advisory from the NC Department of Justice

Article on prevalence of phishing scams