I just received an e-mail, and I'm sure that it is a phishing scam because I don't use Bank of the West. The strange thing is that the e-mail talks about protecting yourself from these types of scams. The e-mail says:

 

Protect Yourself Against Fraud

 

 

 

At the Bank of the West, we take protecting your financial information seriously. We recognize and respect your right to privacy when it comes to your personal financial information. Please attend to our request to our active consumers to protect them of online fraud and frequent rising scam attacks against our financial institution.

 

Actually, we are performing security improvements of our banking community and enforce customers to register their sensitive information for an additionally created free security service to prevent any fraudulent activity against their assets and savings. We, hereby ask you to respond within few hours of current notification and complete security application form via our SSL protected website to apply for this service absolutely for free, otherwise your account(s) may not process posted transactions correctly and on time.

 

Please visit us to apply.

 

At the bottom, there is a link to http://61.95.74.220/.bankofthewest.com/OnlineBanking/index.htm but I never clicked on the link because I'm worried it might contain a Trojan or virus. Do you think this is a scam, or could it be real?

it looks legit

 

here is the whois info

 

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jhtml;jsessionid=54XR5O5OZ1F3YCWMEAQSFEQ?whoistoken=0&imageKeyPage=/whois/entry.jhtml&_requestid=274782

The link doesn't go anywhere, just a 404 page.

it looks legit

 

here is the whois info

 

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jhtml;jsessionid=54XR5O5OZ1F3YCWMEAQSFEQ?whoistoken=0&imageKeyPage=/whois/entry.jhtml&_requestid=274782

 

Yes, Bank of the West is real. However, I don't think the link in that e-mail goes to Bank of the West's real web site. Cap'n Refsmmat is right, it does go to a 404 page. Perhaps the authorities shutdown the link after they realized it was a scam.

We, hereby ask you to respond within few hours

 

This bit seems especially dodgy...

The link doesn't go anywhere, just a 404 page.

 

 

it worked just before i posted

http://rjohara.net/pfishing-scams/2005-03-28-bankofthewest.html

http://www.scamdex.com/NSX/S/NSX2Apr053874ProtectYo.html

 

 

You're right... it's a scam.

http://61.95.74.220/.bankofthewest

 

This should be a dead giveaway that it's fake.

The principal givaway is that no legitimate bank would ask you to do that. All banks (at least in the UK), when warning people of these scams, state quite clearly that they would never ask customers to post their account information online.

This should be a dead giveaway that it's fake.

 

 

Indeed, it points at an IP address, NOT a domain name. The domain name is in the url in an attempt to strick you.

I get these from paypal constantly.

 

They are "fishing" scams. They just hope you input your valid info into their website.