Phishing Emails What To Look Out For
Phishing examples
It is vitally important to be on the lookout with regard to spam and also phishing emails. A huge amount of spam is really someone attempting to sell you something or tryng to get you to sign up for something.
There are, however, phishing emails that are sent out with the intention of grabbing your private information for use by a third-party (identity theft ). I will call your attention to a phishing e-mail that I got, which is shown below.
Sample phishing emails
From: Inter-Switch Bank Card Prize
Sent: Thu 10/07/10 2:51 PM
Subject: Bank card Award Promo
This is to legally inform you that an Inter-Switch BANK CARD having a fund worth(£ 654,000) Six hundred and fifty four thousand pounds has been accredited in your benefit by Nautical Bank Of Nigeria Personal Identification Number are ATM-4918691859180912. The ATM Card has a daily withdrawal limitation of $4,000.00 USD per Day. Contact with your [Names, Address, Country, Tel] Genuinely, Dr.James Williams
Tell: +234 xxxxxxxxxx (number taken out considering that it is a fake anyway).
how can you identify a phishing email
First of all, before you ask, yes, this is the style that I received the email in. This is undoubtedly suspicious at first glance and would throw up a whole bunch of dead giveaways, despite having someone who is extremely unaccustomed with this type of deceptive email. The reality is, there are a lot of people who are in financial trouble and logic can take a back seat to desperation, which is what the writer of this email is hoping. If you get something like this, it’s a fake.
There are lots of characteristics of this particular email that are common to this specific kind of fraud. The sentence structure is actually terrible, a kindergarten pupil could write something far better in comparison to this. The formatting appears as if it was done by some type of hairy primate.
The contact telephone number is an international number, which is quite common when it comes to rip-offs such as this one. In the event that you phone that number, if it is even an active number, it will probably cost you a considerable amount of money.
Now let’s take a look at the erroneous reasoning behind this. Why would the Oceanic Bank of Nigeria (which is in fact a genuine bank) randomly have picked me for a large sum of money such as what is detailed within the email message? These people do not know anything about me (and if they did, they would be fraudsters anyway since I have never dealt with them).
According to this phishing emails, they have set aside this high value BANK CARD for me based on my email address but they don’t have any contact info for me (hence why they ask for it). Nobody would hand over that sum of cash based upon an email address.
If this was really some kind of lottery or perhaps prize, they would thrive on publicity, I would certainly have needed to enter the contest with my contact details already and they would subsequently publish the fact that I was a winner to ensure that they might get more people to purchase their products and or services.
On top of it all, they put the serial number in the email. No bank would do that. They don’t even do this for their bank account holders in surface mail, never mind email. They also wouldn’t send out something like this via email message anyhow.
If there actually was over 600,000 British pounds waiting for me, I would certainly get formal communication that would not set off my scammer sense.
As nice as it would be to really get free money like this, logic must win the day and logic says that this is a horrible attempt at fraud. I’ve seen far better phishing emails.
