How to Protect Yourself from Phishing
What is Email Phishing?
Phishing is a type of cyber attack that uses a disguised email as a weapon to collect payment or account information from the victim. The goal of the con artist is to trick the victim into believing that the email message he or she received is something that they must must do in order to prevent something [usually undesirable] from happening if the victim does not comply with their instructions. At first glance, the email usually looks like a legitimate request that was sent from a Web site they use, or from their bank, or from PayPal, or from someone within a business that the victim works for, but it's really not.
Because phone numbers can easily be traced by law enforcement, Phishing requests are rarely sent to victims by way of a cell phone text or a voice phone call. However, it has been known to happen (see "Text Phishing" below). After all, most criminals are just plain stupid, and fail to realize that cell phones are essentially goverment surveillance and tracking devices. Emails, on the other hand, are a con artist's best weapon. That's because email recipients rarely look very closely at the sender's information in order to verify who is really sending them that message. Most people just casually glance over their emails, and don't scrutinize them very closely whenever unusual information requests are made of them.
Unlike phone calls, which are easy to trace, emails are much easier for criminals to hide behind. That's because it's very easy for them to get a free email account using any of the many free email services such as Gmail and Yahoo, and make-up any user name they want. However, most businesses, including Alaska's List, would never use a free email service to send you an email. We would use our own servers, and the email would verifiably be sent to you from an address at our domain. That's why you should always check the FROM: field of any emails you might recieve that ask you for account or payment information, and verify where the message was actually sent to you from. You should ignore the SUBJECT: field altogether, because scammers can type anything they want there, which is how they trick most people. However where the message was actually sent to you from cannot be faked by the sender. So, if you get an email that was sent to you from an account that's hosted at a free email service, such as somebusinessname@gmail.com, rather than from the actual domain of the business in question (e.g. someone@somebusinessname.com), then you should be very suspicious of that email. It is very likely a Phishing Scam.
Whether you're at home or at work, always maintain a healthy amount of skepticism whenever you're asked to provide any kind of account information or personally-identifiable information by email, especially payment information. There are absolutely no legitimate businesses that I'm aware of which would ask you to provide such information by email or text. So, take a long, close look at the source of any such emails, and verify that it is was actually sent to you by the business or organization that you think it was before you respond.
The best way to avoid Phishing scammers is to just use your telephone number when advertising on the Internet. That way you can avoid all of the e-mail scammers altogether. Like I said at the beginning of this article, cell phones are government tracking devices. So, it easy to identify who is contacting you. This is the only way that I permit people to advertise in the Guns section, and the system has worked very well over the years. We have never had any reports of anyone being scammed in the Guns section, and the readers who do contact our Gun advertisers tend to be people who are genuinely interested in what the advertiser is offering, since scamming someone over the phone is both difficult and hazardous to the perpetrator.
What is Text Phishing?
Remember how I just said that scammers are unlikely to phish people using texts, because text numbers are easy to trace? Well. That was true when I first wrote this article back in 2018, but that's all changed now. Apparently, scammers have found a way to spoof cell phone numbers now, in the same manner that they spoof emails.
That's right. Scammers have now developed a way to send text messages to your phone that look like they were sent from phone numbers that don't actually belong to them. This is called "spoofing." They've even been able spoof Google's five-digit phone number (22000), which Google uses to send people confirmation codes. So be very careful about anything that's sent to you from one of Google's text numbers. It might be a scammer.
Yep. We've entered into a whole new era now where it's hard to tell who's who, even with phone numbers.
Apparently, the scammers are making good use of this new technology, for text-based scams are now becoming prolific on the Internet. I've even caught some of these text scammers here by stinging them with my own classified ads. Yes, I use Alaska's List to buy and sell too.
These are my observations--things that you need to know in order to spot a text phisherman, and avoid getting hooked...
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