This latest phishing scam is obvious for several reasons, as shown below on the images. These criminals are learning not to include a recipient address because anyone with more than one email address can easily tell at a glance if the recipient address is NOT connected with their Westpac account. *D’oh!*

For experienced marketers and market researchers, the questions asked (all about attitudes and intentions) are meaningless if the person responding is identifiable, because it’s well-known that people will rarely reveal their true intentions like this. They’ll lie for the money being offered — which is out of all proportion to the value of the information in this case.

The REAL purpose of the scam is to obtain your personal account information — ALL of which is already held by Westpac!

Here’s the scam email, with notes: 

Here’s the attached form (minus the header image). NOTE: You should NEVER open attachments in unsolicited emails!

Take the usual precautions. The first indication for me is usually that it’s sent to an email account that has no connection to my banking, or it’s for a bank that I don’t use. But there are obviously enough dummies around who respond without thinking that it’s worth doing by these crooks.

As always with scams, there are basic errors in the spelling, grammar, punctuation or syntax.