How You Can Avoid Phishing Scams

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Phishing basically boils down to stealing someone's information. The easy way to remember it is that they're "fishing" for your information. In general, phising scams just put out a big tasty hook online and make their fortunes from the hopefully small number of people that bite.

In general, phishing encompasses a wide range of scams that all boil down to information stealing. It's usually easier to just cover a few examples. They're pretty obvious once you see them in action.

One very prominent phishing scam is the PayPal email scam. This scam involves someone sending a phishing email to a large number of email addresses. These are obtained through various sources. Some less reputable websites sell collected emails. Other programs automatically search the web for email addresses and scrap them together. Spam lists are often traded between spammers and scammers, so it can be hard to track a source. Knowing how to avoid spam in general is the first way to not be caught by a phisher.

The emails themselves are doctored to make them appear to be from official Paypal support. They'll then feature some type of call to action. A popular one is that there was a security problem with your account and you need to login or provide new information to register again. You are then directed to a spoof site: a fake website that is made to look like the real one. The website then records your information and puts it into a scammers hands. Depending on how much you had tied to the account, they can steal your money and lock you out of your own account. They would also now have a password that you like and your email address, which means that they may lock you out of your email account too (unless you used a different password, which you should).

Sometimes the scam will even occur through the mail or over the phone. Regardless, phishing scams for information can happen in just about any online format. The scam is always the roughly same though. Someone provides false credentials and tries to get your personal information.

The reason that scammers try to get ahold of your information is pretty simple. It's almost always about money. Sometimes it takes a bit more of a roundabout form.

Phishing for banking or credit card information is pretty simple to understand. If a dishonest person gets your sensitive personal information, then they have a lot of options for normal theft or different forms of identity theft. Naturally, this information is in hot demand. Online banking and online shopping open up tons of possibilities for making easy money with stolen information. You should be incredibly suspicious of anything that is asking for your banking information.

Note that Paypal and Ebay, in particular, seem to be targeted often. This is probably because money stolen from a paypal account can be withdrawn to a foreign country through a dummy account very quickly. If done properly, then it will be impossible to retrieve it. Paypal phishing scams are extensive enough to warrant their own article.

Of course, they don't just try to get your banking information. Sometimes scammers are more creative. If there's a chance to earn money doing something, someone will eventually figure it out. For example, phishing scams exist that try to steal online accounts. Steam Accounts, Xbox Live Accounts and World of Warcraft accounts have all been targeted through standard phishing scams. In these efforts, someone usually claims to represent the support team for the game. They then cite a problem with the account and get the person to hand over their login information. With a few clicks, the victim is locked out of his account and the phisher has his prize (which could usually be sold for a fair sum of money). More inventive scammers would target people who were selling their own accounts on online marketplaces. Since this technically violates the terms of service for the account, phishing emails would claim that the relevant service would permanently kill the account unless they gave them the necessary information in an "amnesty program." This turned out as you would expect.

The point you should take away from this is that phishing scams are constantly changing to take advantage of new markets. They will do whatever they can to separate people from their money. Find out how to protect yourself on the next page.