Phishing Email: Many inexperienced users on the Internet often fall victim to various online scams and lose their personal data and sometimes their bank balance. Scammers use various tactics to trick and deceive inexperienced Internet users. Remember, new methods of internet scams are constantly being invented. Hackers are always active in this work, also one of the oldest and still very effective techniques of this internet scam is phishing email scam.
Importantly, email scams are often so effective that inexperienced internet users as well as many experienced internet users fall victim to email scams without their knowledge. So it is very important to be a conscious internet user to be able to spot phishing emails. So today's article is going to discuss 5 ways by which you can detect phishing emails very easily. Also today's topic of discussion is “What is Phishing Email? How to identify?”
What is Phishing Email?
Phishing email is a well-known technique of scammers that you can consider as the most common skill of Internet scammers. In this case, hackers or scammers will send you an email that looks like a legitimate email. Hackers or scammers send such emails in the name of many big companies, such as Google, Facebook or your bank. They customize the emails so well that an inexperienced user and sometimes even the most experienced users may not realize that the email is sent by a scammer/hacker. They use various techniques to make the sender address of the email look like the original company email, so that the email users do not find any visual difference with the original email.
As a result, it is common for an inexperienced internet user to think the email is legitimate and click on a link within it and input their personal data such as their bank account details or any other sensitive information and that is where hackers/scammers get their hands on it. This is basically a general explanation of how phishing emails work. Now let's know some ways, by using which you can recognize any phishing email on sight and by applying this method you can recognize 95% phishing email.
Can Read: What is E-mail marketing?
How to detect phishing emails?
Even the less experienced often make mistakes in identifying phishing emails. But I can definitely say that if you know the below mentioned points well then you can easily recognize phishing emails.
Remember that you don't need to do any special trick to recognize a phishing email. No special study is required for this. A little awareness can save you from phishing emails.
Hackers or scammers usually exploit your unconsciousness to do damage. So increase email awareness and use email safely.
5 ways to spot a phishing email
If you know these 5 ways to recognize a phishing email, you will be able to identify 95% of the time that the email is not legitimate. The ways are-
- Legitimate companies use their own business email
- Legitimate companies will address you by name
- Legitimate companies will never ask you for sensitive information
- Emails sent by legitimate companies will not contain spelling errors
- Legitimate companies will not redirect you from their website
Below is a detailed description of ways to recognize phishing emails:
You can read these articles
How to create a free blog site?
How to Create an E-Commerce Website?
How to learn SEO? Why do you learn?
1. Legitimate companies use their own business email
Scammers will often send you emails using the domain names of large companies. But most of the time the address they send you mail from looks like the original company email address, but if you look closely you will notice that some spellings are different. Because, of course, they can't access the company's core business email.
For example, if the scammer sends you an email in the name of Google, you may notice that the email's sender address says google.com instead of gogle.com or gooogle.com. This is because these two names are very similar to the original domain and most users will assume the email is legitimate even though the domain is somewhat similar, every character in the address is usually assumed they don't read.
Not noticing this spelling is one of the main reasons for falling victim to email scams. So the first thing you notice about any suspicious email is the spelling of the email address. Another thing to note is the domain name of the email.
Of course, if a legitimate company sends you an email, they will use the business email address under their domain name. eg support@microsoft.com. But if you receive an email sent from a free email provider like microsoft-support@gmail.com, you can be sure that it is not a legitimate email. Sent by hackers or scammers.
To be sure the email is not legitimate, note that if the email contains a link that takes you to a third-party website instead of the official website, you can be sure this is a scam or phishing email.
2. Legitimate companies will address you by name
This little trick to spot phishing emails is very effective but many people don't know about it. If Google or Microsoft or your bank or any other legitimate corporation sends you an email, they will always address you as Dear Siam or some other word that clearly contains your name. Because, since you are their customer, they must know your name well and will send emails in your name.
But when hackers/scammers send you an email pretending to be a company, they definitely don't know your real name. They can get some idea of what your name might be by looking at the email address, but never know your name for sure.
For example, if your name is Siam, your email address might be potato69@gmail.com. So most of the spammers address you directly in the email using adjectives like dear sir, dear customer, dear valued member without bothering to think of names.
However, yes, some companies may address you anonymously, but this is negligible and depends on the specific company's policy. But most of the time if you see an email coming to you from your bank or a service you used and the mail from there doesn't address you directly by name, you can consider that email suspicious.
3. Legitimate companies will never ask you for sensitive information
Always remember to recognize phishing emails, companies whose services you use or do business with, do not email you any of your sensitive information.
For example, information like your date of birth, your exact address, your bank account number or most importantly, your online account password etc. will never be asked.
This is because, if you have used one of their services, they already know or have collected enough personal information about you. Make sure that, of course, Google does not send you an email asking for your Google Account password.
Remember, be sure to carefully note what information is being requested from you in any email that arrives in your inbox and whether the email sender has a legitimate need to request that information. Sometimes, if your online account is disabled for some reason or disabled by authorities, a company may ask for some documents to verify your information.
Note in particular that, before providing that document, you must verify the sender address of the email by reading each letter and verify that your account has been deactivated for any reason by logging into your service account.
4. Emails sent by legitimate companies will not contain spelling errors
This is the most effective way to detect phishing-emails by scammers. Most of the scam emails you will see have various spelling mistakes and many grammatical errors in their messages. If a legitimate company or your bank authority sends you an email for professional purposes, you should definitely not see any grammatical mistakes or spelling mistakes and understand the mail quite clearly.
But usually the email scammers are unprofessional, most scammers send phishing emails from third world countries and their English skills are very poor. Of course! Because they are not very educated, they have to resort to scams to earn money.
So you will find English spelling and grammar mistakes as a common feature in phishing-emails sent by almost all scammers. But note that this does not mean that all scam emails or phishing emails sent by hackers are like this.
It also appears that there are many scammers who know good English. In that case you need to look at other features to identify scams i.e. phishing emails.
However, note that if you find any spelling or grammar mistakes while reading an email, do not read the email again, because then you can be 200% sure that it is a scam email, a hacker or scammer sent you a phishing-email.
You can read these:
You can use one of the top 10 video editing software
What do you know about software? What is software?
What is Facebook Professional Mode? how to enable professional mode on Facebook?
What are the rules of Google search? What is essential to know?
5.Legitimate companies will not redirect you from their website
Another way to spot scam emails is to look carefully at all the links in the email message. If your bank or any service provider you use sends you an email asking you to view a link, that link is 100% likely to contain any information on a content or page on their website.
Remember, even if this is not a link to the original website, it may be a link to a subdomain of their website, in no way a third party link. For example, your bank authority or any service provider will never send you any email and link to www.scamer69.tk or any such third party website.
If you read the email in your inbox and see a link somewhere in the email message that does not belong to the company's website or any subdomain, you can be sure that it is a scam email, a phishing email sent by a hacker. Also, sometimes scammers may provide a link to their own website by hyperlinking a text called Click Here instead of providing a direct link.
Remember, sometimes even legitimate companies use such hyperlinks to keep their emails clean. In the case of such a link in an email message, you can first open the link in an incognito browser tab to determine if it is indeed going to a legitimate website. However, it is a good practice to install a strong antivirus and malware scanner on your desktop before visiting any link to protect against phishing emails.
No comments: