As the economic crisis appears to peak, more banks will fail. This has experts predicting that new phishing scams will arise targeted at the customers of those banks, and the agencies helping those customers may be actually encouraging such attacks. For example, IceSave, the British arm of an Icelandic bank, failed last week, cutting off over 200,000 customers from their deposits. The UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme is coordinating refunds for those affected. Amazingly, they announced that they will send two emails to all IceSave customers. The first tells them how to claim their refunds and the second will direct them to an website where they can apply for them. The details being publically announced by the FSCS along with their plans on doing everything via email make their customers ripe for a phishing scam. They’ve more or less given phishers everything they need!

It would be simple for a scammer to set up a fake IceSave website, and using the details provided by the FSCS, create and send legitimate looking phishing emails. Fortunately the FSCS is also offering a way for customers to claim their refunds via postal mail, and so far no fake sites or phishing emails related to IceSave have been detected, but given the nature of phishers it is likely only a matter of time.