Monday, June 23, 2025

Avoid being a victim of identity theft by learning to recognize spoof and phishing emails.

 Avoid being a victim of identity theft by learning to recognize spoof and phishing emails.



Mysterious email—what is it?

Spoof emails, sometimes known as "Phishing" emails, impersonate legitimate business or financial institutions. Common sources include eBay, PayPal, Barclays Bank, and others. After that, you'll see a web link in these emails; clicking it will load a login page where you can input your information. Many con artists will go to great lengths to obtain your personal information; for example, a common tactic is to include links to seemingly legitimate websites in their counterfeit emails in the hopes that recipients would submit their details. The fraudster can use the information you provide on one of these fake websites to conduct crimes in your name.

What gives them access to my email?

You could be asking how the con artists learned your address or that you were a customer of a specific financial organization. Scammers' excellent fortune is usually the deciding factor. They often don't go after specific people, but rather swarm randomly generated email addresses with thousands of scam emails in the hopes that a handful will fall for it. Additionally, they share addresses that they have found by searching the web for authentic ones. Your address is probably floating around the web someplace if you've ever published something or participated in an online forum. Your address is typically added to a list of 'easy victims' if you have fallen victim before, increasing the likelihood that you will get even more scams.

Just how do I recognize these emails?

If you receive an email and think it might be a fake, here are four easy things you can do to verify. If your email fails any one of the four conditions, it will fail the test altogether. You can have a 99.9 percent certainty that the email is authentic if it passes all four checks. Even if your email passes all four tests, it's a good idea to check the "Other Tips" section for a last assurance that it is authentic.

Things might go wrong with your email

You should immediately delete and not reply to any email that fails even one of these four checks; it is likely a hoax. If your email doesn't pass the test, I still recommend looking at the "Other Tips" page for additional ways to recognize a spoof email.

If you're not sure

Never click on a link in an unsolicited email unless you are very certain it is legitimate. Get in touch with the relevant business (go to the "reporting a spoof" page) and inquire as to the authenticity of the email.

The first test is to find out who the email is for.

Take note of the email's salutation style. "Dear eBay user" is a common phrase for spoofs. This should be your primary indicator that you are dealing with a spoof email. Spoof emails are those that don't use your name. Never in your life will you receive an email from eBay, PayPal, or a bank that uses anything other than the name you used when you enrolled.

"Dear valued customer" , "Dear member" and so forth.

A fake email is one that does not contain your personal address. Proceed to the next step in identifying a spoof email if the email appears to be addressed to you. Rather from using the standard "Dear member" or "Dear user" format, some more sophisticated spoof letters now incorporate your name or email address. Therefore, I would still highly recommend that you complete the other three tests, even if your email were directed to you.

The second test asks, "Where does the link go?"

A link to confirm your details will be included in the majority of hoax emails. Spotting a hoax email is as easy as hovering your mouse over the link. You may find the "link destination" in the bottom left corner of your screen when you hover over the link. A spoof link's destination typically looks like this:

"http://slp.clinker.net.mx/.sh/.a/index.htm?SignIn&ssPageName=h:h:sin:us"

Make a comparison to a genuine eBay link:

Does this address lead to the correct location on eBay? Selling Summary on MyeBay

Plus, the change is obvious. Looking at the initial portion of the link destination might help you determine if an email is false or not. If the destination is a string of digits (102.382.54.23) or looks similar to the URL in my spoof link above, it's likely a spoof.

In the initial portion of any legitimate link, you'll see the name of the company. For example:

go to http://cgi.ebay.co.uk www.cgi.ebay.com [URL] Please visit http://cgi.paypal.com.

Take note that the last portion of some fake links will have the words "eBay" or "PayPal" appearing in them. They are spoofs as well!

The only element of the link that any legitimate email will have is the firm name, right after the http://. Go on to the next test if you're still not sure if the email you received was a hoax.

Third Test: Can you tell me who sent you the email?

The test isn't as tough as it seems; it's just a bit confused at first. Our first order of business is to determine the email's origin. Even though most people don't know this, most email applications actually allow you to track where an email came from. Viewing the "FULL message header" is necessary for this; the following email applications provide the steps to do so. Get in touch with your email service provider if you don't see your program here.

Gmail at Hotmail Step 1: Select "Options" Press the "Mail display settings" button. 3. Choose "Full" from the drop-down menu to reveal the header settings; this is the third option. To preserve your settings, click "OK" on step 4.

Express Mail 1. Go to the email's "Properties" by right-clicking on it. Step 2: Go to the "Details" section.

Now that we can see the headers of the messages, we can tell a spoof when we see one:

See the "Received From" section of the header. A spoof email appears to have originated from a different user than the intended sender. By running this test, I was able to detect that a Yahoo account had sent the phishing email. An official eBay email would never have come from a Yahoo account!

Fourth Assessment: Follow This Link

If your email passed the first three checks, then try this. It has come to light that clicking on the link in some hoax emails activates malware. Before you continue, check that your computer has a reliable virus scanner. Another option is to use a removable backup device to copy any crucial data from your computer.

A browser will launch and redirect you to what appears to be a genuine login page when you click the link in the email. I will demonstrate both of the methods that can be used to detect a spoof login page! Examine the URL bar located at the very top of the login page. Look at the URL's prefix, "http://". The address bar of any legitimate online banking, eBay, or PayPal page will NOT begin with "http://" but rather with:

"https://"

The "s" in https:// denotes "secure" and indicates that you are about to transmit data via an encrypted connection.

A spoof is any website that does not begin with https://. Secondly, the padlock symbol in the lower right corner of the screen is different on both pages. Take note that the real eBay login page features a padlock, whereas the fake one does not. You are about to send sensitive information over an encrypted connection, as this padlock indicates. It is a spoof if the bottom corner of your screen does not display a padlock icon when you log in.

Still More Ways to Recognize Spoofs

1. Syntactic issues Please check your email for typos and any errors. You may rest assured that any emails that are legitimate will not contain typos or other spelling errors.

2) Commercials? Ads for Burger King don't appear in legitimate eBay emails!

Checking the identification on Hotmail If Hotmail detects that a senderID cannot be validated, a new warning message will be displayed. This notice will be included in any phishing email. (I should mention that I recently got an actual email from eBay with this warning, so you can't always trust an email based on this method alone.)

The four-digit PIN Your personal identification number (PIN) should be wary of any website that requests it. Be careful not to enter your PIN! Get in touch with your bank right away if you've already inputted and submitted your PIN.

5. Concealed cubes This is an example of a pop-up message box that you might see on spoof websites. Legitimate websites do not employ pop-up boxes that request information.

6. Illusion of impending danger The majority of phishing emails will trick you into believing that your account is in danger unless you take immediate action. No, that's not right.

7. Messages from eBay You can also find any official eBay email in the "My Messages" area of the eBay website. After logging into your eBay account, go to "My eBay" to view your messages. A link labeled "My Messages" can be found on the left side of the screen. If the email you got in your inbox isn't here, it's probably a spoof. Click here to see if it is.

8. Don't worry about the email. The sender's email address is irrelevant. Spoof emails almost always seem to be sent from a legitimate address. I occasionally get emails that start with "from":

PayPal support, member services, awconfirm, safe harbor, and operator 862736743 are all email addresses associated with PayPal.