+ Phishing

What is Phishing

Phishing is conning people into giving up personal information such as passwords to banking sites or ebay, using email and sites that look legitimate. This information is then used to commit fraud in transferring money out of the persons bank account or getting credit in that persons name.

Since phishing online is a fairly new phenomenon, there are not yet many laws giving consumers avenues of redress in these situations. If your credit card/debt number is stolen, you have no liability as long as you report the unauthorized transaction within 60 days. For other types of fraud, it varies from business to business.

How to Identify Phishing

The following is a list of identifiers to phishing emails.

  1. The email identifies an orginization to which you have no account or affliation.
  2. You recieve email from what appears to be your bank on an email account which your bank doesnt have.
  3. The email is not personalized to you or your orginziation.
  4. Phishers typically include upsetting or exciting (but false) statements in their emails to get people to react immediately
  5. They typically ask for information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.
  6. If you suspect the email may be fake, do not use any links in the email to access the website as they often point to fake sites.
  7. Some phishing is done by redirecting real sites to fake sites with the use of viruses or malware. To prevent this, make sure you run a virus scanner and keep your comptuer up to date.

How to Report Phishing

If you receive an email that you suspect to be a phishing email, you can do the following things to report the email.

  1. Forward the email to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov
  2. Forward the email to the "abuse" email address at the company that is being spoofed (e.g. "spoof@ebay.com")
  3. When forwarding spoofed messages, always include the entire original email with its original header information intact or forward as attachment if your email client supports that.
  4. Notify the Internet Fraud Complaint Center of the FBI by filing a complaint on their website: www.ifccfbi.gov/