Blocked Account

This morning, I received an interesting email entitled "Unblock your Account". Supposedly, it was sent by MyBank2U Important Notice (notice-important@security.my). The above is the content of the said email (click on the picture for a better view) which I have captured from my computer monitor. There's nothing else apart from the above—not even a "Dear Sir" or "Mr Koh". Apparently, my account at Maybank has been blocked and this email is supposed to guide me how to unblock my account. To do so, I will have to log in to my online account; meaning that I'll have to key in my username and password into the relevant blanks in the links provided by the email. I clicked on those links and was duly brought to other pages which looked very much like the genuine Maybank sites.

Of course this is clearly a bunch a craps. But I thought it's a beautiful trick anyway. Imagine the trouble these idiots had to go through to do all this. I must say that it looks very, very convincing, except for the spelling of the word "because" which is wrongly spelt here as "becouse". Other than that, the whole setup is impeccable.

Unfortunately, this kind of tricks very rarely can work on people like me. Firstly, I'm quick to notice wrong spellings in formal documents. And whenever I see spelling errors, I would immediately raise questions.

Secondly, I don't do online banking because I never did go through the trouble of learning how to do it. So even if I had fallen for this trick, I would have had to go to the bank to ask someone there how to do online banking first; and only then would I have the required username and password to give away to these idiots.

Thirdly, because of the nature of my business, I know quite a fair number of bankers, and I can very easily call one of them to ask why my account has been blocked. Furthermore, there is a Maybank branch along Jalan Pantai, which is just about 2 minutes away from my office. So I simply walked over and was promptly informed by the clerk that my account is in good order.

If I were to behave like a typical Malaysian, I would have already lodged a police report by now. Lodging police reports is a favourite national pastime in Malaysia, you see. Even the woman who instructed her husband to do the cucumber and brinjal thing on her lodged a police report too, only to have the tables turned on her in the end. But I decided to be "un-Malaysian" in this case—the police would be happy to know that they have one less report to bury in their filing cabinets; they're probably fast running out of space to store all the reports which they're gonna sit on for a very long time to come.

So anyway, although I'm not lodging any police report, I thought the least I could do is to publish this ingenious means of getting your banking information here in this blog. I know it seems unbelievable that anyone would fall for this kind of cheap trick, but last year alone, Malaysians have been tricked to the tune of over RM20 million via similar ways. So by sharing this here, if I can save even one of you out there, I would consider that I have achieved a great deal.