Phishing and Spoof Emails
I got an email the other day asking me to verify my eBay information. I might not have given it a second thought, except it was to an email address eBay doesn’t have. Luckily, that triggered my suspicions and made me look more closely. I shudder to think what might have happened if the alarms hadn’t gone off. Since I’m trying to spend my time actually doing work and not going through emails, I often don’t look at my messages until late at night,when I’m tired and not paying that close attention. I needed this little slap up the side of my head!
Anyway, the alarms did go off. I do know that eBay doesn’t ever send these kinds of emails. Neither does any other reputable business. If they need information from you, that request will show up when you log onto your account at the actual eBay webpage. Another clear indicator was that when I hovered my mouse over the link and looked to the bottom left field over the explorer toolbar, the web address that showed up was clearly not eBay. It was something like www.ebay.bogusaddress.com/somethingorother. It’s always a good idea to do this little exercise before clicking on a link you’re not sure of.
I did report this to eBay by forwarding the email to spoof@ebay.com. You can find out more about spoofing and phishing at eBay’s site: http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial/
This isn’t a problem just for eBay, of course. I’ve received “account verification” emails that appeared to be from Bank of America, Sears, CitiBank, etc. What is important to remember, when you get an email like this is NOT to follow their links. If you think it might be a valid request, enter a url you know is valid into your own address bar (google the company if you need to find the valid address), then look for messages or log onto your account.
The damage these crooks can do to your credit and even personal life is enormous. And they are very talented at making their emails look official. Just remember to be very, very careful, even suspicious, and you’ll be able to protect yourself. And pass this information on to everyone you know.
