I recently got an email from Bank of America offering me a pretty good credit card deal. Usually, I chuck those offers away as spam (both electronic and physical) but this time I decided to bite.

The “apply now” button pointed to http://links.em.bankofamerica.com:8083/…, fair enough. I click. But wait… IE6 says…

Firefox provides more info without layers of abstraction…

I clicked “OK” and got to… https://www.mynewcard.com/! (you’ll notice that going there directly redirects to https://mynewcard.bankofamerica.com/, so only when you click “apply” do you get to see mynewcard.com.)

I consequently emailed BofA with my concerns and got this (surprisingly expedient) reply:

“We recognize that any unsolicited e-mail, legitimate or otherwise, is reason for concern. I can assure you that www.mynewcard.com is a legitimate website of Bank of America.”

Well, not much assurance there since I replied to the original email (cardservices@replies.em.bankofamerica.com), but a whois query confirms that mynewcard.com indeed belongs to BofA. What percentage of the population would go beyond clicking that “OK” on the IE warning as just another annoyance? You know the answer.

So, BofA got three things wrong. Firstly, they had links in the body of the email; the argument has been beaten to the ground… don’t educate people to click them. If the bank has great offers, they should have them available when people log into their accounts. Secondly, they messed up on the certificate… it’s for mynewcard.bankofamerica.com, not what appears in the address bar, mynewcard.com. And finally, they used an unfamiliar domain to process the application. Why? I think the answer lies somewhere in the marketing department where they decided that mynewcard.com is cooler sounding than sound security measures and long term good customer training.

Update: Richard mentioned that the rapid response meant that BofA have heard this concern once before. I found this thread [dansanderson.com] discussing mynewcard.com in August 2003! Which adds a fourth thing BofA did wrong: they didn’t fix it!