Now before you get all excited, this post has nothing to do with the alternative-rock band Phish. Instead, it has more to do with "phishing emails", those unsolicited emails that you get in your inbox that appear to be from a legitimate company, but instead try to lure you into providing them with your personal information. Yet another scam.
Well, last week I nearly had to cancel my credit card over a phishing email. Late one evening I was checking my email in a drunken stupor. I got a message that appeared to be from PayPal, discussing that there were security issues with my account, and that I was being asked to confirm some of my information that they keep on-file. The email appeared legitimate, as there were the proper graphics, and proper links embedded within the email.
At this point, I did not know what to think of the email message that was sent to my inbox. It seemed rather convincing, though vague. I clicked the link, where I suppose it would have taken me to a secondary webpage where it would ask me to "confirm" my account information. Then the warning light went on. Thank the maker for Firefox, as it displayed a warning that I was on an unencrypted page. PayPal would not dare operate without unencrypted pages.
Then the 30-watt bulb that sits idly inside my cranium went off. The email was sent to my Yahoo! account. I have no PayPal account at that address. This was a blatant scam, and I nearly fell for it! I did a quick search on the web, and sure enough, this site told me everything I wanted to know about this scam.
Fraud Watcher International is a good site to bookmark, especially if you get a lot of unsolicited mail in your inbox. If you are like me, I get so much spam that I can hardly sift through it all. I luckily have spam filters on my email accounts, so I can spend more of my time reading legitimate email rather than sifting through all the garbage. This also means that I do not check my junk-mail folder for legitimate emails that were mistaken for spam.
While you're at it, ditch Outlook Express, and try Thunderbird. It has a pretty snazzy filter that has the ability to "learn" to automatically detect spam. Better yet, I would ditch everything that bears the Micro$oft logo. But that's my humble opinion.
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2 comments:
Scary! I've received multiple emails claiming to be from my credit card company or Paypal. Either they're horribly mispelled or the embedded link doesn't match the stated link. I always either type in the url manually (and carefully) or use one of my bookmarks. I also report them. I don't know if it does much good, but all my card companies and Paypal seem to have a place to report them. I'm really going to have to look more at my browser and email client (Firefox/Thunderbird). I don't know how the filter/spam stuff actually works.
I imagine that Paypal, eBay, and numerous credit card companies receive thousands of complaints per day due to fraudulent activity that takes place over the internet. Sometimes, one must consider that reporting individual infactions (like the ones mentioned above) do any good.
It's like the little Dutch boy who uses his finger to plug the hole in the dike. Plug one hole, and three more open.
The internet is more secure from fraudulent activity than it has ever been, but that alone doesn't solve the issue at hand. The best defense from scammers is to be well-informed. Scammers prey on the naive, on the ill-informed, and on the foolish. This is the main reason why I posted the link to Fraud Watcher International. It should be in everyones' bookmarks, so they can check the site every time they recive a message that they are weary of its' validity.
I still get about 3 messages per day that are variations of the Nigerian-419 scam. I have been told that this scam has been around for nearly 100 years, and people still fall for it.
Unfortunately, the internet has made it simple for scammers to collect tens of thousands of addresses and send fraudulent messages en masse. Now that they can spoof email addresses, it's becoming tougher to catch and prosecute the buggers.
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