Talk about fraud

[stona]

Last year I had an email from my bank, asking me to confirm my phone numbers. All the links in the email looked good so I logged in online and checked my contact details. No problem. A couple of weeks later I had an apparently identical email except for one additional line "Click HERE to check and update your contact details". All the rest of the links were good. Like a fool, I clicked the new link, which took me to a page that looked identical to my bank, entered my landline phone number, then my mobile, then was asked for my credit card number... It would have been so easy to fall for that!
Pete

It would be easy, which is why many perfectly reasonable and intelligent people fall for such scams.
As a general rule, never open a link in an email.

[stillp]

As a general rule, never open a link in an email.

I usually don't, but was distracted this time.
Pete

[Guest]

Hold your mouse pointer over the link, after a few seconds that will pop up a tooltip showing where the link actually goes to. Take this example:

[ATTACH]471544[/ATTACH]

It’s in Dutch, as I couldn’t find an English one in my spam box right away, but basically it claims that an administrative check showed that something related to me hasn’t been registered to my e-mail address (which I censored with the red bar ) so it urges me to do that so my credit card won’t be blocked. The link in the message appears to go to “icscards.nl/actualisatie” but as you can see in the grey rectangle (the tooltip that appears when I keep my mouse pointer still over that), it actually points to linkmn.gr/actueel1 …

As soon as you notice the URL shown in the tooltip is different than the “readable” one in the message, don’t click on it! Mark the message as spam in your mailer and ignore it. (Note, of course, that this only applies if there is an actual URL (=web site address) in the message, like above. If it says “click here” or something, the URL will differ from the text even in legitimate e-mails.)

Even if the two do match, think before you click: does it seem truly legitimate? Have you had genuine dealings with the organisation that (appears to have) sent the e-mail before? Would the real organisation plausibly ask you to do what the e-mail is asking you? If you think “no” to any of these, do as above: mark as spam and ignore.