Fight Phishing: Don't Get Hooked by Fake E-Mail

Online financial transactions are becoming more commonplace every day. Unfortunately, incidents of online fraud are as well. Committing online fraud using forged e-mails has become so rampant that it has spawned its own term-phishing.

 

Phishing works by using authentic looking but fraudulent, or "spoofed," e-mails that appear to come from legitimate sources. By asking you to reply with details such as your bank account, PIN, or Social Security number, or username and password, to your online accounts, phishers try to get you to reveal sensitive personal information.

 

Increasingly, phishing involves e-mails that, instead of asking you to send information, include a link to a copycat Web site that mimics every detail of the entity that the messages are pretending to represent. The e-mails then instruct you to click on the link and log in to "your account" on this fraudulent Web site in order to "update" or "verify" information. In reality, the phishers capture that data and then use it to log in to your real account and drain it dry, or to steal your identity.

 

One way to protect yourself from being exploited by these attacks is not to click on links or attachments in e-mails that ask you to provide any type of information about, or access to, any of your accounts.

 

If you're unsure whether an e-mail is genuine, type in the Web address of the site you want directly into your browser's address bar. Do not copy the URL included in the suspect e-mail-use a search engine to find the correct address if you're not sure what it is. Beyond protecting yourself from phishing scams, if you use e-mail to communicate with your customers-especially if you conduct any type of online commerce-you also need to take steps to protect them. Make sure that you never ask your clients to send account information via e-mail and tell them that's your policy.

 

Electronic communications are still a great way to keep in touch with your customers- just remember to avoid putting them in a situation where they have to wonder if an e-mail that comes from you is real or fake.

 

E-mail is extremely easy to forge, and today no responsible institution relies on it to gather or verify personal or account information. Recognizing that fact can help you-and your customers-separate legitimate e-mails from fraudulent ones and keep everyone safe from being hooked by phishers.