Thieves Use Phishing Emails to Steal Your Identity
Have you ever received an email from a company that you do business with asking you to visit a website to update some personal information? You are asked to enter you login information and update some vital personal information. But, how can you be sure that you are at the website that you think you are, and not someplace that is looking to steal your information?
Criminals creating websites to look like a company or financial institution is becoming a very large problem. The sole purpose for these sites is to trick you into revealing your personal information. The combination of using email and websites to fool you into giving out personal information is called “phishing”.
Because they look like the real thing, it is sometimes very hard to spot a phishing email. The problem is that once you click on a link in a phishing email, you go to a website that is there only to steal your personal information.
The website that you are taken to when you click on a phishing email link will look nearly identical to the real website. If you are careful and look at the website address with great care, you can figure out that you are at a phishing website. Depending on how clever the criminals are, this process can either be easy or rather difficult.
You have to remember that the people who are sending phishing emails are professional thieves. There is a whole lot of money to be made by tricking people into giving out their personal information, so they usually spend a great deal of time and effort to make both the emails and websites look very real.
They put so much time and effort into coming across as the real thing because they really want to steal your information and profit from it. They will use the logo of the actual company and they model their emails and websites after the real deal.
It can be very difficult for the average person to determine if an email or website is real. The criminals are counting on you to not be able to tell the difference and trust that you are on the real website. This lets them steal your information with great ease.
Never clicking on links contained in an email is your best defense against being caught by a phishing attack. Go directly to any website that you want to visit, even if you think that the email is real. By never clicking on email links, you can never become a victim of a phishing scheme.
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