Today I received a fairly credible phishing attempt for Alliance & Leicester bank sent to me on an address I have only ever given to SMC Direct. When I reported it to SMC Direct they said there have been no other reports from anyone else and that I probably have a virus on my machine. This seems highly unlikely.
Has anyone else received spam or phishing emails on addresses they only gave to SMC Direct?
I have made similar enquiries about similar situations in the past to similar institutions, and the template response is always that I/you/we/one am apparently the only one affected by whatever affliction has infected their process.
The first few times I figured, ok, maybe my manual anti-virus isn’t as good as I had assumed. After a while, though, you start to realise that they are just telling you this because the likelihood that you can find *other* alibis for the same symptoms is so low that they can get away with lying to you.
I wouldn’t stand for it, personally, but I’m not quite sure what methods one has at one’s disposal to stand *against* this contemporary trend of blaming every system breakdown on customer failure.
What can we do?