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What
does phishing mean?
Phishing
means sending an e-mail that falsely claims to be a particular
enterprise and asking for sensitive financial information.
Phishing, thus, is an attempt to scam the user into
surrendering private information that will then be used by the
scammer for his own benefit.Phishing uses 'spoofed' e-mails
and fraudulent Web sites that look very similar to the real
ones thus fooling the recipients into giving out their
personal data. Most phishing attacks ask for credit card
numbers, account usernames and passwords.According to
statistics phishers are able to convince up to five per cent
of the recipients who respond to them.
How
can you make out if an e-mail is genuine or not?There
are ways to 'spoof' an e-mail so that it appears to come from
someone other than the person who is actually sending it.
E-mail spoofing is a popular way of scamming online. An e-mail
can be spoofed by tweaking the settings of e-mail clients like
Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger and Eudora.However,
finding out whether an e-mail is genuine or not is not very
difficult. Every e-mail message contains headers that have the
following information:
Origin,
which shows information about the machine that sent it,
Relay,
which shows the sender machine relaying it to another, and
Final
destination,
which shows the machine that receives it, the IP address and
the domain name.
Check
out this URL: http://www.lse.ac.uk/itservices/help/e-mailheader.htm
for an example of what the different things in an e-mail
header mean.
By
learning how to identify what the header components are you
can distinguish whether an e-mail is genuine or spoofed.
That
sounds a little complicated. Is there any easier way?
Not
really. But following these three guidelines can help protect
you.
A
legitimate financial institution will never ask for details of
your account via an e-mail. A corollary to this rule is that
never e-mail financial information over the Internet. E-mail
is not a secure method for transmitting this kind of
information.
If
you initiate a transaction and want to provide your personal
or financial information through an organisation's Web site,
look for indicators that the site is secure, like a lock icon
on the browser's status bar or a URL for a Web site that
begins 'https:' (the 's' stands for 'secure').
Unfortunately
no indicator is foolproof, so always call your local bank and
ask for verification before responding to any form of
electronic correspondence that claims to come from the bank.
What
are the other popular e-mail scams?
The
Nigerian scam is another very popular e-mail related scam that
has found a few victims in India.
The
scam itself is simple. An e-mail, which claims to be written
by a prominent official from an African country asks the
recipient to help them release millions in the bank and offers
them a share of the bounty.
Once
the recipient responds he is asked to visit the (African)
country and meet with officials to collect the money. But once
there, instead of getting money, he is forced to cough up a
considerable sum.
This
scam is known as the 'Advance Fee Fraud' or '419 Fraud,' after
the section of the Nigerian Penal Code that specifically
prohibits this con.
If
you are interested in knowing more about this check out this
link: http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/Business/nigerian.htm
Source:rediff.com
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