Protect Yourself from Phising Scams

What is phishing?

According to webopedia.com, phisting pronounce as “fishing” is an act sending an email to a user that falsely claim to be an established legitimate company (such as ebay, Paypal, Google Adwords) in an attempt to scam the user into giving up their private information for the purpose of identity theft. Always, the email directs the victim to visit a web site that they are asked to update their personal data such as passwords, credit-cards social security, bank account numbers that the legitimate organizations already have. The web site however is a bogus one and the scammers learn how to pretend the real legitimate company website.

How do you spot fake or phising emails

If you receive emails from established companies like Ebay, PayPal, online banking like Citibanks,

and so on and their subject looks lilke “Update Your Account Information Within 24 Hours or it will be suspended” you should pay attention and don't click any links embedded in the message body. Instead you should type in the full website address of the established company that the email pretends. The reason is if the update is so important, the company so have something mention in their official web site. If in doubt you should forward the whole email message to the company customer support.

This probably easiest way to check if the email you received is a legitimate one.

The other way to protect yourself from this phising scams is to update your internet browsers to the latest version. I personally use firefox 2 and it warns you if some website looks suspicious. Initernet Explorer 7, I think has a similar feature, so if you are a window fan I strongly suggest you download the latest version by logging into microsoft.com

That's for today.

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