The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning about fraudulent schemes that are misrepresenting the agency to capture consumers' personal details to accrue financial benefits. WIRED published this in news on May 24, 2008.

According to the FBI, consumers have been lately receiving spam mails that pose to be from the agents of FBI, its other officials, or from Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI Director. The agency said that the malicious e-mails are using photos of the FBI Director, letterhead, seal, and/or banners in an attempt to lend legitimacy to the messages.

Furthermore, these types of fake e-mails commonly involve charity and adoption frauds. The potential victim receives a spam mail asking to donate money to a charitable organization as the e-mail's subject title reads "Urgent assistance is needed." Although a genuine charity's name is used, the money actually goes to a fraudster.

Also, the kinds of schemes mentioning the FBI officials, agents or the name of the Director are typically inheritance notifications or lottery endorsements. Although other fraudulent campaigns include extortion and threat e-mails, Website tapping involves malware attachments, and auction scams over the Net.

The FBI also stated that the use of the FBI's name as a social engineering tactic is to persuade the recipient to consider the e-mail as legitimate. Online thieves aim at some of the more vulnerable zones like charity, greed, pets and love.

However, the FBI said that it never sends e-mails to citizens soliciting information. It suggested the people to be careful about any e-mail using the reference of the FBI, its Director Mueller, or any of the FBI officials supporting any kind of online activity. Among its other practices, the FBI frequently issues alerts about the emerging e-mail scams that distribute fraudulent e-mails to users around the world.

Besides, the IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center) informed in the opening week of May 2008about the most dangerous e-mail scams during 2007. According to estimates, in the USA alone, these e-mail scams were responsible for an unprecedented loss of $239 Million in 2007 although the number of reported complaints became steady since 2005.