In his line of work, funeral home director
Brian Bass has come to expect the occasional juvenile phone prank. But the hoax recently perpetrated on the
small-town Eubank Funeral Home where
Bass works is bigger than any adolescent antics. Cybercriminals hijacked the funeral home’s
identity as part of a worldwide email phishing scam.
For the past month, inboxes across the United
States and beyond have been getting funeral notices that appear to be from Eubank Funeral Home in Canton, Texas (60
miles east of Dallas). Without saying
who has died, the fake emails invite the recipient to an upcoming “celebration
of your friend’s life service” and instruct the recipient to click a link for
“more detailed information about the farewell ceremony.”
“It reaches to people's curiosity and their
natural instinct to find out who passed away,” Bass told Yahoo News.
But instead of going to Eubank’s website, the Better
Business Bureau says, the link in the email takes readers to a foreign
domain where malicious software is downloaded onto the user’s computer allowing
criminals access to passwords, financial records, and other personal information
stored on the computer.
“This scam email, disguised as a funeral
notification, reaches a new low,” the Better
Business Bureau said in a nationwide warning last week. “Scammers are always on the hunt for new ways
to evade the delete button.”
It’s unknown how many people have fallen
victim to the hoax, but Bass said Eubank
Funeral Home has received 50 to 100 complaints a day since mid-January. Calls and emails have come from as far away as
Finland and South Korea. “We filed a
police report and our security people are in touch with the government, but
nobody can stop it yet,” Bass said.
The ordeal forced the funeral home, which has
been in business for 88-years, to remove its phone number from its website and
post disclaimers and warnings about the scam.
“It's not really the way your company wants to be known,” Bass said. “It has taken away time we need to help
families.”
The fraud comes at a time when many funeral
homes are trying to meet a growing demand to deliver information via social
media and digital channels. Eubank sends death notices only to email
subscribers and always includes the name of the deceased. “A lot of our subscribers are retirees … they kind of want to see if people they grew
up with have passed away,” Bass said.
Last year the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a coalition of cybercrime watchdogs,
noted that a record-high 441 business brands were hijacked in April 2013 and
that “the landscape continues to evolve as fraudsters seek new victims in
untapped markets by targeting more brands.”
In its warning, the Better
Business Bureau urged consumers to remain vigilant because the hackers will
likely clone another funeral home’s identity before long.
“These kinds of things piss me off,” said
Bill Harasym, a Wyoming man who got one of the emails on Jan. 15, just six
weeks after he buried his mother. Some web
investigating verified Harasym’s suspicions that the email was a fake. He then alerted Eubank Funeral Home and wrote about his experience on his personal
blog to warn others about the cons. “They're
just dirtbags,” he told Yahoo News. “There's a special place in hell for them.”
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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