Monday, 28 April 2008

Distingushing between real and spoofed emails

Another name for a fake website is "spoof".

Two internet services Phisers use to carry out internet fraud are E-Mail and the world wide web.

Phishers use fake statements in their e-mail that they may send out.

Phishers may ask for personal details that no genuine institution would request in an e-mail e.g. PIN numbers or passwords to accounts.

Phishing e-mails are not personalised for example they will never use your forename or surname in the e-mail. They cannot do this because they have to send the same e-mail to many different people.

Most banks (and other financial organisations, such as Paypal) use secure web sites. You can recognise these by the use of https://, rather than simply http:// in the URL. Notice the extra letter "s". Secure web sites also display a padlock icon in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

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