How Do You Know an Email Phishing Scam When You See One?
Email phishing is a way for scammers to attempt to collect vital financial and personal information from the people to whom they are sent. This is potentially a very expensive lesson if one falls for the emails. While many are very easy to recognize, others are becoming quite sophisticated and can take even the most astute person
How email phishing is being used is to collect your private information such as personal data and financial accounts data. Once he has these, the email scammer can then use your information fraudulently. He could go straight to the financial accounts you gave him information about and steal the funds within the account. Or he could use your personal information to set up ways whereby he can still get money but end up leaving you holding the bag such as taking out a credit card in your name.
One popular phishing email is the foreigner who wants to or needs to move money out of his country to the States. Feeling sorry for his plight, the generous email receipient will allow give him the information needed to access their own bank account. To tell the truth, what often precipitates this generosity is the simple fact that greed takes over for the poor foreigner will offer to pay you from the funds transferred. You might just see a small amount of money transferred to the account but the next thing you know, all you have will be removed from your account. As long as these scams have been around, some people still fall for them.
There is another type of phishing email that is even harder to catch. It is an official looking email from your bank or credit card company or some other financial company. It requests that you update or modify your personal information at their site and provides you with a link to go there. Since it looks very official, many people click the link, go to the site and enter their login and password. After all, it looks just like your bank’s site. This is what can make these scamming emails so much harder to detect. Everything looks like it should. However, you should be aware that most financial companies will not ask you to update your information this way.
Whether you are playing or working online, you need to keep your wits about you regarding the emails you receive. Perhaps the best thing you can do to help prevent email phishing is to report any emails that you get that look suspicious. Maybe once in awhile, you will report one that is completely legitimate. But this is a case of just better safe than sorry.
Filed under: Finance