Indian Banks Promoting Phishing

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you see URLs like

• healthinsurance-icicilombard.com original
• icici-homeloans.com original
• bajaj-allianz.co.in original
• bajajallianz-igain.com original
• hdfcbankcarloans.co.in original
• hdfcbankpersonalloans.co.in original

Phishing websites, right? What if I tell you the said institutions are actually promoting these urls to generate leads?

These well known financial institutions have approached a search engine marketing company. The company in turn creates these websites, and promotes them on the internet. Any icici home loan advertisement on the internet takes you to this look-alike website.

My initial thought was that banks are unaware of this. I contacted the marketing company to learn more, and they told me "We are a search engine marketing company and we have contractual agreement with these financial institutions to create, host and promote their site on search engines". In fact, they have published a case-study on ICICI on their website. (Don't want to name the company. If you are interested, run a whois on any of the above domain names. All websites are hosted on the same ip address, by the same marketing company)

Why is the marketing company promoting these look-alike domains? Perhaps they are routing the customer details to a direct sales agency rather than the bank. Its easier to create a one-page website rather than integrating with the bank's official website. Or perhaps its some SEO trick; the look-alike domain can have pages & keywords that are seo friendly.

Apart from the privacy concerns, this is actually a larger issue - the banks are promoting phishing. A phisher could easily take up another domain like icicibank-personal-loans.com (available at the time of writing) and use it to steal personal information. How is the average internet user going to figure out its a fake?

Banks should take phishing a bit more seriously. On one hand they run campaigns "Don't enter personal information unless its https and the url reads icicibank". And on the other, they advertise and market look-alike websites to generate leads. Its plain double standards.