Rebecca Nappi: Internet scammers deserve a special place in, well …

In the movie “What Dreams May Come” a character played by Robin Williams is killed in a car accident and ends up in heaven. His wife, despondent over the loss, kills herself and ends up in hell. Williams decides to rescue her by walking over an “ocean” leading to hell. He steps on bobbing faces of people who are in hell but don’t know it yet.

Their faces look like animated volleyballs. They talk nonstop, justifying their right to lie, kill and steal. I am convinced that the men and women behind Internet phishing schemes have those exact faces.

Phishing – pronounced fishing – is the Internet term for spammers who send official-looking e-mails from established banks and other businesses. The e-mails insist that you update your bank account or credit card information. But when you do, these volleyball-in-hell faces steal the information – and your money.

For the past two weeks, hundreds of Inland Northwest folks, including me, have received e-mails that appear to come from BECU, Washington state’s largest credit union. Formerly known as Boeing Employees’ Credit Union, it has 435,000 members nationwide.

I don’t belong to BECU, but the subject line of the June 13 e-mail caught my eye: Unauthorized charge to your credit card. I figured it for a scam, but I wondered why the e-mail hadn’t been snared by my computer’s spam filter. A slight digression here.

I can click on our company’s e-mail filter folder and see all the spam detoured away from my inbox. Hundreds arrive each week, hawking such items as Viagra – woman wants man is able – and fake university degrees.

When I open the folder, I feel as if I’m lifting the lid off a toilet tank and peering in. In older toilets, stray feces sometimes wind up there, and the inside can also develop a moldlike growth. Gross. Now picture those faces from hell bobbing in the toilet tank. That’s how I envision the people who inhabit the underworld of phishing.

The underworld is growing. According to the worldwide Anti-Phishing Working Group, there were 20,000 reported new phishing schemes in May, a record number. Most originated in the United States, and 137 legitimate companies and organizations saw their brands hijacked in those schemes.

Anyway, I opened the BECU e-mail. I clicked on a link that led to BECU’s Web site. I googled BECU to make certain it was the actual Web site. It appeared to be. Todd Pietzsch was listed as a media contact. I called and got Pietzsch’s voice mail, and his cell phone voice mail, and left messages on both phones. When he didn’t return the calls within 24 hours, I grew suspicious.

Did the spammers make up an entire Web site and a media contact person? I noted the last name again – Pietzsch. A subtle play on Phish? Paranoid, perhaps, but explore a phishing hole and you get dragged into the muck. Williams’ film character, for instance, overstayed in his wife’s hell and slid into the darkness, even though he’d already made it into heaven once.

Pietzsch eventually called back. He’s real. And BECU is dang mad about the hijacking of their good name in this latest phishing expedition. The spammers replicated BECU’s Web site, and some BECU customers fell for the scam. Remember, Pietzsch said, legitimate organizations never ask for account numbers and passwords in e-mails.

The fake BECU e-mail and the link to the replicated Web site were dismantled by the real BECU last week. But then on Monday, I received a new and different e-mail from “BECU.”

This one offered $50 if I’d fill out a survey. I put in a fake customer I.D. number – 666666666666 – and put as my password burninhell. Maybe, someday, they will.