Here Phishy, Phishy, Phishy

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.