Thursday, April 12, 2012

No Phishing!

Working for an ISP I have gained some inside knowledge of some of the scams that occur from time to time.  For example, of 100% of all email sent and received over the Internet, an ISP typically filters about 80%+ of it as it is malicious, spam , etc. before it gets to you, the end user.  However, and as you know, sometimes you still get junk in your email despite our best efforts to filter it out first.  Therefore, you, the end user, must take precautions on that 20% you do receive. 

Something I see occurring more and more frequently is ‘spoofed’ email.  For example, you get an invoice saying you owe or just paid a $900 bill for paypal, mastercard, verizion mobile phone, etc.  It looks legit because it came from sales@paypal.com or info@mastercard.com.  But that could be a ‘spoofed’ email address which really comes from somewhere else.  Most have a natural instinct to obviously open that email and look at your online account by using the supplied link in the email!  Don’t do it.  If you roll over the link in the email, you will notice the URL (internet address) will not be paypal.com, mastercard.com, etc.  If you click it, the website may even look legit but is not.  These scammers are looking to phish (attempt to acquire info such as user, password, credit details, etc by appearing as a trustworthy source) your info.

In fact, I don’t even recommend opening that email at all.  If you want to be sure, instead, just login into your account like normal.  (not via an email link)  Or call the 8XX number (not the one in the email but on your last statement) and ask for customer service to confirm these charges have not been made or paid on your account. 

 Also, there are options to remove spam and phishing by right clicking on it in your web mail browser.  This will help ISP's improve their filtering.  Help us help you kind of approach.

This isn’t a new scam, phishing has been around for a long time but I am seeing it more and more frequently and many regular (non techy) folks are not even aware this is taking place.

So email users out there, be warned and aware of these online scammers!