Whether you are new to the Internet, or have been online for a while, learning how to recognize phishing and lottery scams will help to protect your personally identifiable data and reduce your chances of becoming a victim of identity theft or fraud. Your biggest and best weapon is vigilance, but you can also employ a few tools to enhance your common sense when confronted with scam emails or websites.
Fortunately, most email programs and servers these days employ spam filters. These will either delete phishing and scam emails before they ever reach you, or divert them into a specially designated spam box along with other dubious emails, such as those offering cheap pharmaceuticals, linking to pornographic or illegal sites or containing viruses, Trojans or other malware. Avoid exposure to these by not scanning the spam box and opening any emails found there. However, some dubious mail may still make it through these filters and into your inbox.
Phishing and lottery scams will often play on your emotions to try and get you to reveal your personal information. This might be an appeal to your better nature, as in a request for charitable donations after a major disaster or for a war-torn area. Alternatively, the appeal may be to greed, as in the request to make a small payment in order to receive a much larger sum. This could be an email telling you that you have won an online lottery that you didn't enter based solely on your email address.
Alternatively, you might receive some version of the Nigeria 419 fraud, where you are approached by an allegedly high-ranking official with a request to help smuggle money out of the area. These are known as advanced fee frauds, and although you may be tempted to think the fees requested are a small risk, they are usually followed by repeated requests for increasing amounts due to "unforeseen complications," or by your bank account being cleared out once the fraudsters have access to your account details.
Be wary of emails that appear to come from financial institutions requesting you to visit a web page or call a phone number to verify your account details, including passwords. Banks do not do this. The emails may send you to "spoofs" of the institution's website, which may look exactly the same as your bank's site. However, the URL, or web address, will be wrong, or may be replaced by a series of numbers, known as an IP address, in an attempt to fool you. When you visit your bank or other online accounts, or call your bank, never use the phone number or follow the link from an email. Instead, use the number or type in the address printed on your statements.
If you are in doubt about the veracity of any email and think it might be phishing or a scam, check the HoaxSlayer and Scamdex websites. Install Internet security software as well as antivirus software, and switch on any features that identify malicious websites in search engine results pages, as phishing and lottery scams are not restricted to email campaigns.
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