What to do if you Receive a Suspected Phishing Scam

Fraudulent methods are utilized in stealing your personal information, suchyou’re your credit card details, your bank routing and account numbers, your secret questions that you submit when you register with a financial website, etc. This act has been termed as “phishing”. You may get several email messages from these phishers, which appear to have come from authentic sources, such as, your bank credit card Company, etc. requesting you to update your personal information to continue having your account with them.

The phishing emails are created by sophisticated scam artists, with the email messages and pop-up windows looking so real. These emails would also include the official logos of the real organizations, along with make-to-believe other information, all illegally acquired from the original site. The phishers would take you to an original looking site through a link provided in the email, and this would be a spoofed site, which you would not be able to differentiate from the original one. Here you might, unknowingly, provide your personal financial information to the phishers.

In case if you receive such emails, you should know how to protect yourself from the scam, and you would need to follow a few guidelines to protect yourself from getting trapped.

The first thing that you need to do is to report to the organization who have been faked or spoofed in that email. You should not do this by emailing them. You should call them and speak to an appropriate person and report the matter. You should never click on the links provided in the email. If you need to update or change your password in the original site, you should type out the site address directly on your browser, or use your personal book mark link. The next thing is to check the security certificate before you go any further with the website. You will find a yellow lock icon on your browser status bar. If you find that the lock is closed, you could be certain that the site uses encryption to help protect any sensitive, personal information. If there should be any pop-up windows, never enter your personal information on that. Update your software in order to get the latest protection from these phishers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 7:42 am and is filed under Online Scams- phishing -Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.