Dummies Guide to identifying Fraud Emails

All of us recieve these 'phishing' emails. They have gotten smarter and are more difficult to identify nowadays. Just wanted to share some of the easy ways in which I identify them!

• Look at the 'From' address, not just what the 'From' name is. For example, an email from 'YourBank' would actually have wierd_address@unrelated.com as address.
• These emails usually give you a link, and ask you to click that link and login into the site. Now, the link text could be anything like http://Yourbank.com/login.jsp and you'd be fooled into thinking that its the correct site. However, this is just the text for the underlying hyperlink (link that takes you to another site. This hyperlink can be different from what text you see here. To identify that, just bring your mouse pointer on this link, and look at the bottom left of your browser. The address that appears there is site address to which you will be led if you click, and if that is different from what the text says - you're being 'phished' !

Those are the simple steps I use to identify phishing emails. As soon as you see one, please forward to the 'spoof' department of your bank/online merchant to help make the Internet a safer place!!

Of course, if you dont trust the email, simply login to your bank site as you usually would by typing the address in the address bar, instead of using any links in the suspicious email to do so, and you should be safe!