Cargo pants and bucket hats are not the only icons of the 90s that are making a comeback; even tax-time scammers are recycling techniques from days gone by. That’s according to Bendigo Bank, which alerted taxpayers to the resurgence of ‘retro’ scam methods on Tuesday, as the end of financial year (EOFY) quickly approaches. Cyber fraudsters are taking a “step back in time”, said the bank, with a new (old) scam that involves customers being asked to open HTML files attached to emails to supposedly view important account changes or sign a document electronically.
These scammers are taking advantage of higher email traffic and pre-tax time purchases to try their hand at a bit of phishing, said Bendigo Bank’s head of customer protection Jason Gordon. “Phishing has been around since the mid-90s, and people have been warned about not opening suspicious attachments for many years,” he said on Tuesday. But like fashion lovers the world over, “attackers are continuously reinventing themselves”, he added.
In this case, file attachments like HTML, which are now relatively uncommon, are being used to bypass spam filters at one of the busiest times of the year for business operators, said Gordon. Bendigo Bank says it has seen a host of recent scam reports about emails with malicious HTML attachments and the bank’s images and branding, which also borrow from the more commonly occurring impersonation scams. These HTML files may open to a fake bank login webpage or form,.
