From the Simplitfy archive. The advice holds up; some statistics and product names reflect when it was first written. For current guidance, talk to our team.
Several studies have revealed that most users end up opening and reading fraudulent emails and most of the time believing in them. Phishing’s main goal is to gather important personal information about you and your finances. The most common reason for the large number of users falling for these emails is that the phishing attempts are so well-disguised that a busy email reader don’t differentiate them.
Simplitfy wants to provide you a few tips to help you identify and differentiate whether that email you are reading is trustworthy or fraudulent:
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They are asking for personal information - Remember, no bank or financial institution asks you to share your key personal information via email, or even phone. If you get an email where they ask for your ATM PIN or your e-banking password, it is mostly a phishing attempt.
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The links seem to be fake - Phishing emails always include links that you are asked to click on. You should verify if the links are genuine. Here are a few things to look for when doing that:
- Spelling - Check for the misspellings in the URL. For example, if your bank’s web address is
www.bankofamerica.com, a phishing scheme email could misspell it aswww.bankofamarica.comorwww.bankofamerica-verification.com - Disguised URLs - Sometimes, URLs can be disguised…meaning, while they look genuine, they ultimately redirect you to some fraudulent site. You can recognize the actual URL upon a mouseover, or by right clicking on the URL, and selecting the ‘copy hyperlink’ option and pasting the hyperlink on a notepad file. But, NEVER ever, paste the hyperlink directly into your web browser.
- URLs with ‘@’ signs - If you find a URL that has an ‘@’ sign, steer clear of it even if it seems genuine. Browsers ignore URL information that precedes @ sign. That means, the URL
www.bankofamerica.com@mysite.netwill take you to mysite.net and not to any Bank of America page.
Finally, Simplitfy highly recommends you to get a good antivirus/email protection program installed. It can help you by automatically directing spam and junk mail into spam folders and deactivating malicious attachments.