Tue 26 Jun 2012 16:56
How to avoid being fooled by "phishing" email.
A "phishing" email is an email message that tries to convince you to
reveal your passwords or other personal details. Most often, it tries
to send you to a website that looks like the real thing (e.g. your bank or
your email provider) but is really a clever duplicate of the real website
that's set up by crooks to steal your information. Often the pretence looks
authentic. If you fall for it and give your password or other personal
details, criminals may steal your identity, clean out your bank account,
send junk email from your email account, use your online trading account
to buy some penny stock you never heard of, send email to all the people
in your address book telling them you're stranded in a foreign country and
need them to wire money immediately, or do any number of other bad things.
But there's a really easy way to avoid being fooled by phishing messages. If you get a message that asks you to confirm or update your account details, never, ever go to the website using a link that is in the email message itself. Remember, anyone can send you a message with any sort of fraudulent claim, containing any number of links that pretend to go to one place, but really go to another. So if you feel you must check, go to the website that you know for sure is the real thing: use your own bookmark (or type in the URL yourself), not the link in the message.