The Bank of England has become the latest financial institution to have its name hijacked in hoax emails sent to hundreds of thousands of internet users over the holiday weekend.
A high-level investigation was under way last night after the Bank revealed it had become aware of the matter only after receiving emails from more than 100,000 recipients of the fake message on Monday night.
The Bank urged anyone who had received the email from a sender purporting to be admin@bankofengland.co.uk to delete it immediately and ignore the attachment, antikeylog2004.exe, which the email claims can protect customers' bank account details.
The email read: "The security of your personal and account information is extremely important to us. By practicing [sic] good security habits, you can help us ensure that your private information is protected. Please install our special software, that will remove all the keyloggers and backdoors from your computer. And will help us to prevent credit card fraud in future."
The email is being investigated by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, which was set up to police cyberspace following a government review three years ago into cyber crime including financial fraud and pornography.
The NHTCU said it wanted to establish who was behind the fake address and urged anyone who received the email to delete it.
The body, which has the powers to launch a criminal investigation, is also trying to establish what effect downloading the attachment has. It may be a virus.
An NHTCU spokeswoman said British bank customers were alert to such scams. The body is already investigating a number of similar hoax emails which the NHTCU said had affected many of the high street banks. She refused to disclose whether any progress had been made in tracking down the cause of these internet problems.
This month NatWest was forced to temporarily shut down its online banking facilities after a fake website was set up and emails were sent to customers asking for account details and pin numbers.
Lloyds TSB, Barclays and HBOS have been affected by similar scams, as has the Nationwide building society.
Unlike banks and building societies, the Bank of England does not have retail customers, but it has received calls from members of the public and other banks about the suspect email.
"We are aware that fraudulent emails, which have the appearance of being sent by the Bank of England, are in circulation. Both the email and attachment are fraudulent," the Bank warned in a statement.
The Bank admitted that the replies it received appeared to be ones that bounced back from recipients - either because they have anti-virus software installed or had set up automatic replies for emails received during the holiday period.
This may suggest that the 100,000-plus emails it had received by Monday night are only a small proportion of the overall number that were sent out by the hoaxer.
A spokeswoman for the Bank said it appeared that whoever had set up the email address had designed it so replies were diverted to the Bank.
The Bank was unable to disclose how many emails it expected to receive daily but regarded the 100,000 as an unusually large amount of traffic.
