Omid Farhang
Table of Contents
A few clues can help you spot fraudulent e-mail messages or links within them.
What does a phishing e-mail look like?
Phishing e-mail messages are designed to steal your identity. They ask for personal data, or direct you to Web sites or phone numbers to call where they ask you to provide personal data.
Phishing e-mail messages take a number of forms:
- They might appear to come from your bank or financial institution, a company you regularly do business with, such as Microsoft, or from your social networking site.
- They might appear to be from someone you know. Spear phishing is a targeted form of phishing in which an e-mail message might look like it comes from your employer, or from a colleague who might send an e-mail message to everyone in the company, such as the head of human resources or IT.
- They might ask you to make a phone call. Phone phishing (vishing) scams direct you to call a customer support phone number. A person or an audio response unit waits to take your account number, personal identification number, password, or other valuable personal data.
- They might include official-looking logos and other identifying information taken directly from legitimate Web sites, and they might include convincing details about your personal information that scammers found on your social networking pages.
- They might include links to spoofed Web sites where you are asked to enter personal information.
To make these messages look even more legitimate, scam artists may place a link that appears to go to the legitimate Web site, but actually takes you to a phony scam site or a pop-up window that looks exactly like the official site.
Common phrases to watch for
“Verify your account.”
Businesses should not ask you to send passwords, login names, Social Security numbers, or other personal information through e-mail.
If you receive an e-mail message from Microsoft asking you to update your credit card information, do not respond: this is a phishing scam.
“You have won the lottery.”
The lottery scam is a common phishing scam known as advanced fee fraud. One of the most common forms is a message that claims you have won a large sum of money, or that a person will pay you a large sum for little or no work. The lottery scam often includes references to big companies, such as Microsoft. There is no Microsoft lottery.
“If you don’t respond within 48 hours, your account will be closed.”
These messages convey a sense of urgency so that you’ll respond immediately without thinking. A phishing e-mail might even claim that your response is required because your account might have been compromised.
What does a phishing link look like?
Sometimes phishing e-mails direct you to spoofed web sites. A common opener:
“Click the link below to gain access to your account.”
HTML-formatted messages can contain links or forms that you can fill out just as you’d fill out a form on a Web site.
Phishing links that you are urged to click in e-mail messages, on Web sites, or even in instant messages may contain all or part of a real company’s name and are usually masked — the link you see does not take you to that address but somewhere different, usually an illegitimate Web site.
Before you click, hover your mouse pointer over the link (on mobile, long-press) and check the real destination URL shown in the status bar or preview. A string of cryptic numbers or a domain that looks nothing like the company’s real address is a suspicious sign.
Typosquatting and cybersquatting
Con artists also use Web addresses that resemble the name of a well-known company but are slightly altered by adding, omitting, or transposing letters. For example, the address www.microsoft.com could appear instead as:
This is called “typo-squatting” or “cybersquatting”.