Protect Yourself From Email Scams And Phishing Attempts

Overall, the internet is becoming a much safer place to do business and consumer confidence in the internet is increasing. Partly this has to do with familiarity. The more familiar people are with something the more that the risks associated with that activity are discounted. So, as more and more consumers use the internet to shop the perceived risk of using the internet diminishes and more people become more and more comfortable doing business on-line.

This is all the more true of email. It has become an essential communication tool for many people and is a part of our everyday lives. However, it's also an open system where you can be contacted by anyone world-wide. As long as someone has your email address then they can contact you, about anything.

As a result, an email address is a potentially valuable piece of information for anyone who wants to contact others, for whatever reason. The criminal fraternity has not been slow on the uptake regarding this and the harvesting and selling of email addresses is big business.

Email is also an essentially anonymous form of communication and you do not truly know who has sent you an email. As a result, its an ideal medium for scamsters and fraudsters precisely because they can remain anonymous and contact literally millions of potential customers or victims with a single click of a mouse.

Here, however, is a list of simple tips that will help save you from scam, fraud, phishing and spam emails:

1. If your email system has some kind of spam detection and/or filtering then turn it on.

2. If you receive a post-dated email (ie an email with a delivery date set in the future) then delete it. This is a favourite trick of spamsters in that it ensures that their email stays at the top of your inbox for several days. Deleting such emails without even opening them is the best way to eliminate this trick.

3. If the email does not address you by name then it's probably a mass email sent out to lots of people. Just delete it. This is especially important for emails that say they come from banks or other financial institutions. Your bank will always know your name, but a scamster will not. If you're not addressed by name, chances are that the email is fraudulent.

4. Never, ever, click on a link in an email that claims to come from a bank or other institution especially if that email says something like 'verify your login details' as it's probably a phishing scam. You are taken to a false page and asked to log in. The fraudsters then have your bank login details. If you must log-in to your bank to check this out then use your own link, never one sent in an email.

5. As with all scams, if an offer in an email simply sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Chances are it's a scam of some sort. For example:
There are no such things as on-line lotteries. If you did not enter a lottery by buying a ticket, you have not won.
No-one will offer you free money for your 'good works' unless you are a charity.
Only reputable lawyers will contact you about inheritances and they will never do so by email; and they will contact you by name.

6. Always check the address of the person or institution that send you an email. If it's a bank or a company then the email address will always have the bank or company name in it. If the address is a throw-away one (yahoo, gmail, mail etc) then the chances are it's being used by a scamster.

7. If the title of an email is in ALL CAPITALS then it's probably a scam email and most likely comes from Africa. For most of us using all caps on the web means that the other person is shouting and it's very rude. But Africans tend to use this form of writing emails exclusively. Nigeria, unfortunately, is a hotbed for scamsters and internet fraudsters.

8. Check any link in an email very carefully to make certain that it comes from or pints to where it says it's meat to. If the URL of the link does not match that of the person or company contacting you then it's probably a fraudulent link meant to trap you.

Now, whilst these steps will not defend you against all the types of fraud and scam emails out there they will remove over 90% of nuisance emails. I use these rules every day myself and very little gets through these checks.

The only other step you can take is to look at the email's header and check the IP address (the number of the form 125.0.0.0) of the first person that sent you the email. There are lots of places on the web where you can look-up IP adresses against countries of origin. If, for example, the company contacting you is based in Europe but the eMail originates in the US then it's probably fraudulent.

By: gwydion

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Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Internet Scams information pages and new scams are added to the Internet Fraud, Phishing and Scams region of his sire forum. More information can be found in the site's Internet Fraud and Scams Articles section.