Below is a message which I have just received from a cousin about identity theft. I am attempting to alert as many friends and family as possible and have deleted as many of the forwarding addresses as I can but these few will not delete. Feel free to pass on to your families and friends. Best regards, Marian ----- Message from "Bruce Maxwell" <brucesm@pacbell.net> on Fri, 23 Jan 2004 13:08:37 -0800 ----- To: "Bill Rehder" <wjrehder@aol.com>, "Ginny Maxwell" <vdorrmax@aol.com> Subject: FW: Important News About Your Bank Account Folks, The e-mail below just appeared in my in-box. This is easily the most brazen attempt at identity theft I have ever seen! If you use their embedded link and "verify" your identity, your account will be drained of all funds within a day. This is exactly the kind of fraud we will nail once we get operational, because the perps will have to come into the branches to get the funds. I had to delete the actual URL because it may cause your mail servers to reject the message. Regards - Bruce Bruce S. Maxwell CFO Dragnet Solutions, Inc. Cell: (650) 867-7471 Office: (831) 338-1572 E-Mail: bruce.maxwell@dragnetsolutions.com -----Original Message----- From: FDIC [mailto:Leanne_Charleton@rocketmail.com] Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 1:07 PM To: brucesm@pacbell.net Subject: Important News About Your Bank Account To whom it may concern; In cooperation with the Department Of Homeland Security, Federal, State and Local Governments your account has been denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act. While we have only a limited amount of evidence gathered on your account at this time it is enough to suspect that currency violations may have occurred in your account and due to this activity we have withdrawn Federal Deposit Insurance on your account until we verify that your account has not been used in a violation of the Patriot Act. As a result Department Of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has advised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to suspend all deposit insurance on your account until such time as we can verify your identity and your account information. Please verify through our IDVerify below. This information will be checked against a federal government database for identity verification. This only takes up to a minute and when we have verified your identity you will be notified of said verification and all suspensions of insurance on your account will be lifted. [URL Deleted] Failure to use IDVerify below will cause all insurance for your account to be terminated and all records of your account history will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington D.C. for analysis and verification. Failure to provide proper identity may also result in a visit from Local, State or Federal Government or Homeland Security Officials. Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter. Donald E. Powell Chairman Emeritus FDIC John D. Hawke, Jr. Comptroller of the Currency Michael E. Bartell Chief Information Officer