Email Spoofing
Have you ever received an email from what looks to be your bank, a financial institution with which you do business, or a website online that is very popular and where you happen to have an account or membership? Of course you have. But have you ever received an email from one of these places telling you something strange such as that your account is about to expire and you need to log-in in order to keep it active.
Or have you received one that is asking you to update your personal information and check to ensure that the info you already have is accurate? Have you noticed that in the majority of those cases, the message encourages you to use a link that is provided and doesn’t actually address you with your full name?
The odds are that they are scam emails that are trying to get you to provide either your financial information or your personal information so that they can either steal your money or your identity. This is an exceptionally common practice and is one that you need to learn to protect yourself from if you’re going to avoid very unpleasant consequences.
Though the email may look legitimate, and if you click the link in the email, it may look as though it is bringing you to the real website, these are often carefully crafted fakes to make you feel comfortable enough to submit your information to a website that is actually recording your access info and personal data for their own purposes.
There are a few things that you should do to protect yourself. Never use links provided within emails. Instead, type the actual address of the website into your browser (not the one provided in the link, otherwise you’re getting the same result, only adding a step). Also, check into the sending address of the email to ensure that it is coming from a legitimate source.
You can do that by checking the header of the email for the actual sending address (which may not be the one that shows up in the list in your inbox, that could be a spoofed email address – that is, one that has been subbed in to look like it’s the sending address, when the mail is actually coming from someone else), and then performing an email search at a directory online.
