I've received enough contacts from people finding my entry from August 21, 2003 and a follow-up entry from August 27, 2003 in search engines that a clarification is in order: To my knowledge, www.mynewcard.com is a legitimate Bank of America website, and is not a scam.

My intention was to point out that recipients of Bank of America's unsolicited email have no way of establishing the message's actual origins, and very few ways of determining that the links in the message go to a legitimate Bank of America website. The email advertised the website www.mynewcard.com, which was registered to "Douglas-Danielle", and not to Bank of America. (Matching registration information would not have been conclusive, but the mismatch was suspicious.) It took further research to determine that Douglas-Danielle was a marketing firm, and it wasn't until I contacted Bank of America directly (through www.bankofamerica.com) that I could confirm that the email and the website were legitimately affiliated with the bank. Given the ease with which such an email and website can be faked, Bank of America and Douglas-Danielle are doing everyone a disservice by encouraging customers to click on links in unsolicited email.

It's worth asking yourself: Do you trust email solicitations? Would you enter your Social Security Number in a web form linked from an unsolicited email? Do you trust telephone solitications? Would you give a telephone solicitor your SSN? Would you even if they knew other information about you, such as your name and mailing address? Do you trust postal mail solicitations? Would you fill your SSN into a paper form from such a mailing and return it using the enclosed pre-addressed envelope?

Would you enter your name, mailing address and SSN into a form on a website at an address printed next to your bank's logo on glossy paper that you received via postal mail? I'm not saying you shouldn't, but it's worth thinking about why.