There is a growing scam which is
taking place known as phishing (pronounced
‘fishing’). It
initially became prevalent with the introduction of AOL in the 1990’s and
basically refers to any way in which an unscrupulous individual tricks someone
into giving them their password or other personal information.
The most common form used today is
an e-mail which appears to come from a bank or financial institution. This e-mail looks EXACTLY like the
communications which you may receive from your bank, but actually redirects you
to an EXACT replica of your bank’s site which is run by hackers. To aid in the scams, some of the
messages even say things like “You need to verify your account
information to protect against identity theft”. If you were to follow the instructions
and input your account information, there would be a very good chance of having
your identity stolen.
Here are some tips to prevent this type of fraud.
- Do not click on links in e-mails which appear to come
from financial institutions or which request personal information. If you use Internet banking sites,
manually type in the address given to you by the print literature you
received from the institution.
You can then make a bookmark or favorite for future use. Only use this method for accessing
the site and make sure that the address is entered correctly with no mispellings.
- It does not hurt to enter your correct username and an
incorrect password once. If
you are truly connected to your financial institution’s site, it
will recognize the fact that you provided an incorrect password and reject
your connection. If the site
is operated by hackers, it will accept the incorrect password and allow
you to continue.
- Make sure that you have up-to-date virus protection
software (i.e. Symantec or MacAfee ) and it is also good
to run a spyware removal tool such as spybot
(available free at http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
) on a regular basis.
For more information on phishing,
please refer to this article from the Federal Trade Commission: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/phishingalrt.htm