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How Do You Know an Email Phishing Scam
Email phishing is a way for those not-so-nice people who prey on others to attempt to collect vital financial and personal information from the people to whom these emails are sent. This is potentially a very expensive lesson if you should fall for one of the emails. While many are very easy to recognize, others are becoming quite sophisticated and can take even the most astute person. Those that usually suffer the most are those who are new to the use of the Internet and online email.
How email phishing is being used is to collect your private information such as personal data and financial accounts data. Once he has these, the email scammer can then use your information fraudulently. He could go straight to the financial accounts you gave him information about and steal the funds within the account. Or he could use your personal information to set up ways whereby he can still get money but end up leaving you holding the bag such as taking out a credit card in your name. This is identity theft and can lead to all sorts of problems including months, if not years, of effort to straighten the mess out.
One popular phishing email is the foreigner who wants to or needs to move money out of his country to the States. Feeling sorry for his plight, the generous email recipient will allow give him the information needed to access their own bank account. To tell the truth, what often precipitates this generosity is the simple fact that greed takes over for the poor foreigner will offer to pay you from the funds transferred. You might just see a small amount of money transferred to the account but the next thing you know, all you have will be removed from your account. As long as these scams have been around, some people still fall for them.
There is another type of phishing email that is even harder to catch. It is an official looking email from your bank or credit card company or some other financial company. It requests that you update or modify your personal information at their site and provides you with a link to go there. Since it looks very official, many people click the link, go to the site and enter their login and password. After all, it looks just like your bank's site. This is what can make these scamming emails so much harder to detect. Everything looks like it should. However, you should be aware that most financial companies will not ask you to update your information this way.
What you can do the most to help with this email phishing problem is to take action and report any email that doesn't look right. If you receive emails from anyone asking you to do something money wise that you did not request, report it to the authorities. You would much rather report a perfectly legitimate email and have made a mistake than to not have and end up losing your identity or money.