Odd spam: we're cutting off your FDIC insurance!

My wife forwarded me some quite strange fraud-spam she received. It attempts to convince you that your bank account's FDIC insurance has been suspended. I've reproduced it below

From: "insurance@fdic.gov" <insurance@fdic.gov>
To: <omitted>
Cc: <omitted>
Sent: Sat, January 8, 2011 3:38:48 PM
Subject: FDIC Insurance

To whom it may concern,

In cooperation with the Department Of Homeland Security, Federal, State and Local Governments your account has been denied insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation due to suspected violations of the Patriot Act. While we have only a limited amount of evidence gathered on your account at this time it is enough to suspect that currency violations may have occurred in your account and due to this activity we have withdrawn Federal Deposit Insurance on your account until we verify that your account has not been used in a violation of the Patriot Act.

As a result Department Of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has advised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to suspend all deposit insurance on your account until such time as we can verify your identity and your account information.

Please verify through our IDVerify below. This information will be checked against a federal government database for identity verification. This only takes up to a minute and when we have verified your identity you will be notified of said verification and all suspensions of insurance on your account will be lifted.

http://haptered.com/fe45q2/index.php?027ed7c0a5ceb6ff916dd3c81e0a0d05 (NOTE: Link URL has had the word 'DISABLED' added to prevent my post from including this likely dangerous link in it.)

Failure to use IDVerify below will cause all insurance for your account to be terminated and all records of your account history will be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington D.C. for analysis and verification. Failure to provide proper identity may also result in a visit from Local, State or Federal Government or Homeland Security Officials.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter.

Donald E. Powell
Chairman Emeritus FDIC

John D. Hawke, Jr.
Comptroller of the Currency

Michael E. Bartell
Chief Information Officer

This is such a strange bit of fearmongering. It's clever in a way, and yet...if the government suspected you of anything, they wouldn't take the incredibly mild action of suspending your FDIC insurance, they'd freeze your accounts immediately. 

I guess they say that about the insurance because it sounds scary, but it's not easy to check, whereas you'd know if your account was frozen. Weird wild stuff. 

Also, it's always good to know that the Chairman Emeritus of the FDIC spends time sending mails to people to let them know about problems. You know, he's retired, but he does some e-mail for them once a month just to keep his FDIC license or something. :)