Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Stealing your identity with Phishing

On a fairly regular basis, we will receive an email in our inbox from a financial institution that we do business with, asking us to bring up to date our information on their website. We should ask whether it is really the site you are familiar with is the one requesting the information and not an identity thief? 

Criminal organizations designing websites to look like a company or credit company is a problem that is increasing. The sole purpose of these sites exist is to trick you into giving your personal information. Partnership to use websites and e-mails to trick you into providing private information is called phishing. This is a good reason to always make use of an identity theft fraud protection service. 

It is not as easy as you might think to catch a phishing email. They usually look very real and will spoof emails you normally get from the real business. The difference is that when you click on phishing e-mail link will take you to a site that is just stealing your identity. 

Phishing sites have the same design and feel of the real website. One way to distinguish between cheating and real website is to take a closer look at the website address. The cheat can be a part of the name in his name, but it will also have several characters to wallow it is a phishing site. 

The organizations that come up with phishing emails and websites are usually experienced criminals. They can usually afford to spend a lot of money and resources to do very realistic e-mails and websites, as there are a lot of money to be made in stealing personal information. These twenty are out to steal from you, so it's generally a good idea to use an identity theft alert level. 

Since the idea is to steal your identity or other data they can use to make money, they want to seem genuine. They want the same look and usability that the real company uses, which includes genuine logos and slogans. 

Because these fraudulent emails and websites may appear to be the real thing, people often find it hard to tell that they are on a phony Web site. The greater amount of work put thieves in their fake websites and emails, the easier it is for them to trick naive people. 

If you do not want to fall victim to a phishing attack, you should never click a link in an email. If you think about the true nature of the email, so please go to the site on normal means other than the email link. The best defense against these types of attacks is to never click on links found in emails, and using an identity theft protection plan solution.

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