Oman: phishing

This evening we received an email purportedly from Omantel asking us to supply our surname and password in order to protect our webmail account. As if this was not enough of a hint of a scam, the email finished with the beautifully crafted line, “Your immediate response is highly needed”.

It’s easy to grumble about Omantel, but their filtering service is normally extremely good which made this lapse of concentration all the more unforgiving as it was impersonating Omantel.

I phoned tech support. The first call died after a few seconds. So did the second. The third call began with a painful repetition of my username before I realised that the chap wanted to check the email on their server which had already downloaded to our computer.
‘You’ve received an email?’
‘Yes, it’s pretending to be from Omantel.....it’s asking for my password....it’s a fake email.’
‘You received an email from Omantel?’ he repeated as if trying to read from a list of prompts on his monitor that did not cover this eventuality.
Sigh. Eventually he realised something was afoot and asked for the email to be forwarded to tech support....’You need to inform your customers.’
My hopes were not high......