Learning to identify legitimate and scam email on our home computers, requesting personal information can be quite a nerve wracking experience for many people. What is the best method?

Phishing scams are abundant online and can be found in a lot of emails hopefully landing in our Spam or Junk folder. Do you take a look at these emails or just hit *Empty folder* right away? I usually just hit this option myself and recommend this action to prevent falling into any sort of phishing scam.

A phishing scam as we know is all about enticing you and me with a email to collect personal information and data to access specifically targeted accounts such as our finances, site information, member information, etc. A email that looks deceptively identical to legitimate sites but asking for the input of detailed personal account information. DO NOT RESPOND.

The best way to combat these Phishing scams is to know in advance the current protocols that your bank or other member site will have in place to contact and protect you. Their methods will vary but usually call for some sort of action to verify that you are this person and may even request you call their office supplying you with this information.

Recommendations to report suspected scams are designed to provide alerts to any new phishing scams and their targets. Fortunately, we can take steps to report a Phishing scam such as the following ;

– US citizens can contact the FTC, Federal Trade Commission using the address spam@uce.gov. and also notify the mentioned credit card company, bank and/or credit-reporting agency also report directly with the business via telephone or website. DO NOT CLICK EMBEDDED LINKS in the suspect email.

– Send a copy to abuse @X X X.com where XXX.com refers to the business site to which you may need to direct the email. ( i.e, a b u s e @ la la bank dot com is the email address for sending phishing emails ‘claiming’ to be from Lala Bank).

– Domain search also known as a ‘whois’ may be able to retrieve the contact details of the phishing email origin but this information may be out-of-date and the email addresses listed is just a email collection account. 

– Send your email WITH the suspect email as a ATTACHMENT so the whole is preserved and useful for investigative purposes.

Preventative measures are best to follow to prevent the loss of financial account information and/or Identity theft and preserve our financial credit. Phishing scams are getting more sophisticated and occurring offline as well.  We must learn to differentiate and sort through the legitimate and false emails rather than become another victim and statistic to online fraud. Read related –> here and there.

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Article(C)2009 Dame Scribe, all rights reserved. Dame Scribe creates articles and posts online. She creates articles on business skills & development, health, science, technology and society and has a strong passion for writing.