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How Do You Know an Email Phishing Scam When You See One?

By Sandra Wilson

Simply put, email phishing is a trap that has been set to catch the receiver unawares and get access for the sender to your financial information. Most of these type of email scams are easy to recognize but every day the scammers get more and more sophisticated with the emails they send out. These phishing emails, therefore, can become harder to recognize as time goes on.

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.

Such emails include the ones in which a foreign individual wishes to transfer money into a state side account so that he may remove such money at a later date. This includes the giving of your account information, having a small amount of money placed into the account, and then a large amount of money withdrawn. It is unfortunate that many people do fall for this simple email phishing technique.

A much more sophisticated type of phishing email is one that appears to be from your banking institution. It will have all the right headers and colors and look very official. It will usually state that due to some problem, you need to go and update your personal information at their website. The email will even kindly present you with a link to the site. You click this and go to a site that looks just like what you would expect at your financial institution. However, if you do enter your login and password, you have just given the crooks what they need to get into your account at the real financial institution's website. Do NOT ever go to your financial institution's website through a link within an email. Just a sound piece of advice.

One of the most important things that one can do to help prevent email phishing is to report each and every email that one gets that appears suspicious. It is far better to be too safe with your identity and finances than not safe enough.

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