INTERNET
SCAMS
Phishing
Phishing as opposed to fishing is an illegal online activity. The
people carrying out this sort of fraud (the phishers) will attempt to
find out important information from you in order to steal your money.
Phishing is usually carried out through email but can sometimes be
attempted through instant messenger programs.
The Phishers will send an email to you which will claim to be from
a trusted source such as a bank, shop or an auction website like EBay.
In the email they will often claim that there is a problem with your
account and that you must log in and make changes or something terrible
will happen. The threats vary but most will claim that a criminal has
control of your account and will steal money from you. The email will
normally have a link to a website where you will be asked to input
details to prove you identity.
The website will look like the real website for the bank or shop
but it will be a very cleverly made fake. Even though all of the
details will look correct any information entered will be used by the
phishers to steal your money.
How to spot a phishing email
Phishing emails can be very sophisticated but there are some tell tale
signs you can look for to spot them:
The ‘From’ Address is from a source very similar to, but not the
same as, the real company. For example the email might say it is from
EBay but the email address might be Ebay@hotmail.com.
Or even more subtly the email address might be a misspelling i.e. services@bank0fscotland.com
where the ‘o’ in ‘of’ has been replaced with a ‘0’ (zero).
The email might contain lots of simple spelling or grammatical errors.
Genuine companies are very careful to ensure that their emails are
correct before sending them out.
The email will not address you directly but will read ‘Dear
Customer’ or similar. Banks have your correct name and will use it on
all correspondence. Phishers will most likely not have this information
and the phishers will often use the first half of your email address in
the hope that it will be your name.
The webpage you are taken to if you click on the link does not have
the correct address in the address bar. The page may start with a
string of number such as http://127.168.5.2.
The webpage you are taken to if you click on the link asks for extra
information such as your PIN number. Banks will never ask you for your
PIN.
Some of these fake pages will claim to be secure. Secure pages will
have a little padlock symbol on the bottom right of your screen:
If you double-click on the padlock it will open a window to let you
check the security of the site. On some scam sites the little padlock
is nothing but a picture, when you click on it nothing will happen.
Avoid Getting Caught out
Read the tips above and delete phishing emails without clicking on the
links within them.
Always type in the full web address to browse to your online
banking. This way you will always go to the correct site and won’t be
tricked by disguised links.
If in doubt phone your bank, they will be able to confirm if the email
was genuine.
Advanced Fee fraud and other internet
scams
Advance fee fraud or '419' fraud (named after the relevant section
of the Nigerian Criminal Code) is a popular crime with the West African
organised criminal networks.
There are many different types of this fraud but in general they
will involve an initial email in which a prominent official has been
left a very large amount of money (usually $30 million+) and requires
help to remove that money from the country. For your help you are
promised a large portion of the money.
In reality this is a scam to get your banking details and to trick
you to forward money to cover the inevitable difficulties in moving the
large sum.
These emails are very easy to spot with their begging content and often
written in block caps with many spelling mistakes.
Common sense will stop this fraud from happening and simply put if it
is too good to be true it probably is.
This advice also applies to emails which tell you that you have won
lotteries you did not enter or high value goods on EBay being sold very
cheaply.
.
Original Tutorial
by Aspman
for TheTAZZone-TAZForum
Originally posted on August 30th, 2006 here
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