electrons's Blog

Email scams are easy to pull off. For the scammer, email scams are simple, cost nothing and most importantly they are very effective. If they send 100,000 emails a day and they manage to steal the identity of just 1 person a day, their business is booming. Unfortunately, more than 1 person has their identity stolen every day, but rather hundreds.

As you can guess, email scams are primarily designed to steal your identity, however be aware there are other reasons. Below are my top 4 widely circulated scams and how they work.

1 - The "remove me from list" scam. Never remove yourself from email lists!

First and most importantly, let me say NEVER unsubscribe to spam email. This means that little link that says "remove me from list" or "unsubscribe from this email list" is a trap to catch a valid email adress. Spammers have no idea who they send email to. They send hundreds of thousands of emails daily. Their computers generate millions of random email addresses using special software. When you unsubscribe, you just told them that your email address is a valid one. Gotcha! Now your addess can be sold to other spammers. Slick huh?

2 - The embedded link scam. Never click on links in emails from banks.

Banks will never email you to change your account data. As people get more educated on email scams, hackers need to develop new slick methods to trick you. Internet mail has no authentication! That means you send an email to look like it came from anywhere you want. With this flaw in internet mail, spammers send an email claiming to be your bank. To make matters worse, they'll use your banks logo's, images, etc.. In some instances they'll copy your banks web page to their own making it look very legitimate. The red flag goes up here when you see a link in the email. This link will take you to a web site that looks like your bank! However it is "masked" to the hackers web page. The email may ask you to update your personal information, or review your account. This is referred to as "phishing" and they got you!

The important thing to remember here is that banks will not email you with a link to update personal information. When in doubt, NEVER click on the link in the email, but rather go to your banks web site directly.

3 - The greeting card scam.

This one seems obvious, but many smart people have fallen for this scam. You get an email saying that a friend has sent you a greeting card, to click on a link to view the card. Spammers have gotten slick with this and can use names from your address book to use as the sender. The link is nothing more than a virus waiting for you to click on it. This scam is affecting lots of computer users.

4 - Image spam

What is image spam? Spam that comes through as an image but is a physical link to a possible malicious web site. Common image spam scams in distribution now are pharmacy drug emails. These may show images of pills for common drugs. Do not click on these images. Image spam was designed to get through spam filters.

So that sums up the top 4 email scams in circulation, currently. Protect yourself. Do not open emails from people you do not know. If an email comes from someone you do know that looks out of the ordinary, question it first. Use caution. Be smart and once again, never unsubscribe from spam emails. If you are getting flooded with email spam, you are on too many lists. Perhaps it is time to change your email address.

Stay safe everyone! Happy emailing.....