Phishing emails are often disguised as legitimate emails from legitimate companies that users often transact with whose primary motive is to gain access to their personal information. These are often sent by “phishers” who are also hackers, scammers, identity theft criminals, or spammers.
How to identify phishing email
Phishing emails often come disguised as legitimate correspondence from a financial institution such as a bank or credit card company. They will tell you that they are currently merging and to protect your account you should verify your account details with them including your bank account number, full name and password where possible.
Other phishing emails will tell you that you won in a foreign lottery (your email or name was extracted) and in order for them to process your check, you need to provide them with your bank details. Some phishing emails contain a link that, when clicked, will redirect you to a legitimate-looking site where you will enter your personal data. Others often have some sort of form included in the body of the message that you need to fill out.
Avoid phishing emails
If you receive an email, pop-up or instant message asking for your personal details or any private information, please do not respond. If they send you a link to click, don’t. It will only redirect you to a fake site. If you want to go to the bank’s legitimate site where you can make transactions, type its address into the URL box of your browser.
Do not call any number that will be specified in any email, pop-up window, or instant message you receive from unsolicited sources. These numbers often do not have the 800 prefix. Once again, these numbers may simply be numbers used by identity theft criminals. If you want to call your bank, call them at the number on your financial statement.
If you receive any suspicious emails, please label them as spam so you don’t receive any in the future. Send and report the email to your email provider so that they are aware that phishing emails of this type are being sent to your subscribers and can take appropriate action. Please also print the email and send it to the appropriate institution or organization. They should also be aware of this phishing email so they can warn their depositors or customers about this problem.
If you have subscribed to any mailing lists, please opt out. Mailing lists of this type can also be hacked by malicious individuals or identity theft criminals to gain access to multiple email accounts at once. There are also sites that will sell your email to organizations that may have other reasons for emailing you.
Read the privacy policies of any site you visit that asks for your personal information. This document clearly explains what information they will collect and how this data will be processed, stored and deleted (if necessary). This should tell you whether or not the site you’re transacting with cares enough about your personal information.