Phishing Scam Emails

By Author: cathy smith
Total Articles: 1
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Phishing is a term given to a relatively new type of crime that have been rapidly growing on the Internet. Phishing attempts to acquire personal information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. We will show you how to detect and protect yourself.

Have you ever received any forged email pretending from well known companies, such as Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, or even the Internal Revenue Service? In our apparel fashion industry, we see these a lot. The following is an example of a phishing scam email that is floating around the internet.(Check out the spelling and grammar. You will get a kick out of it!)

"Dear Paypal Costmuer,
To get back into your Paypal account, you'll need to relog in in your account.
It's easy:
1 Click the link below to open a secure browser window.
2 Confirm that you're the owner of the account, and then follow the instructions.

Before log in your account will be activated let us know right away. Reporting it is important because it helps us prevent fraudsters from stealing your information.

Please don't reply ...
... to this email. It'll just confuse the computer that sent it and you won't get a response."

Now let's take a close look at this very actual phishing email we received recently. The Phishing emails will often look exactly like you would expect a legitimate message from these reputable companies to look, they will use the same colors, logos and form items for you to complete.

Right of the bet, it does not take a genius to figure out that "Costmuer" is spelled wrong. Hey, if these scumbags want to scam innocent people, the least they should do is to check their spelling right? We are not going to analyze the rest of the grammar errors, but you get the idea the type of scam emails that are composed of.
These types of phishing emails will contain the links that will lead to you web pages with malicious codes, virus, Trojan lurking in the background to affect your computers, stealing your personal data and such.

So how do you identify if an email is phishing or not? Very simply. Just move your mouse cursor over to the link, and at the bottom of your browser the true link path will be revealed. For example, if it shows something like

http://203.26.41.137/refin/~eoxEdkeicleia...

You know it can't be legitimate. Yes, it is that simply to detect phishing emails.

Final words, watch out especially for those government emails from IRS, for they are designed to scare people to take immediate action. The phishing emails masquerading IRS are designed to inject fear into innocent people thereby forcing them unknowingly to take immediate action to "comply". As always, these phishing emails will provide links that will lead innocent victims to cunningly masked pages that "seem" like a legitimate IRS website, along with the logo to fool and convince people to provide personal data and bank account information steal and commit identity theft. Be careful not to fall for it.

Arm with ourselves with better knowledge and let us better educate ourselves to stop those scumbags. You can also report such phishing emails to the companies that are being masqueraded. This will help legitimate companies to combat the scams.