How to Avoid Becoming a Victim of a Phishing Scam
Phishing is rapidly on the rise and you got to know how to protect yourself from these scammers, who make constant effort in knowing your personal identification and financial details. The scam has reached such heights that the police, and even the FBI, are quite over-burdened with these mounting cases. Banks, credit card companies, and shipping companies are all aware of the facts, but hardly act on your behalf. You got to know how you can avoid being conned.
You got to stay informed regarding the various ways used by the scammers to defraud you. You should beware of the phishing emails and must be able to detect fraud just by reading them. They will invariably ask for your personal identification details, or provide a link in the emails for you to visit a website, which you may find to be a replica of the one for your bank for example. There you might be asked to submit your username and password, and other details. You should not reply to these emails, or click any link that appears in the body of the email.
You would need to protect your personal identity from being hijacked. You should be careful not to let know your credit card number, and always ensure that the website, where you are submitting your personal financial details, is secured. On the top of the browser you shall find a lock icon, and that must be displaying a closed position for you to know that the said website is from a secured environment. More-over, the website address should begin with ‘https”, and that ’s’ would let you know that personal information that you submit in that website is encrypted when it is sent.
There are other methods for the scammers to know your personal details, and they are through the various viruses, which steal your details from your computer and deliver them to the scammers. These are mainly viruses, adware, worms, trojans, or other malware. You would need to use anti-virus software, such as, MCAfee, Norton, which must be the latest versions and the virus library in the software should be updated frequently to protect your computer from the new breed of viruses born every day. You should be careful in opening email attachments. Emails having attachments with files having extensions, such as, .exe, .pif, or .vbs, should be immediately deleted.