What is an email phishing scam?
In brief, a ‘phishing’ email is one that pretends to be from a company or bank like eBay, PayPal, Moneybookers etc, and which asks you, (for various reasons), to enter your account data, such as login details or to click on a link provided in such scam email.
These scams are often supported by fake spoof websites, and victims are tricked into thinking they are logging to a real website. Phishing is a form of identity theft, where fraudsters steal your identity and personal information to gain access to your accounts or commit other crimes using your personal data.
And here is a latest scam email pretending to be from Moneybookers.com with subject line: Withdrawal Your Balance NOW! Add Your Debit Card!
Click on image to see an entire scam mail.
How to easily spot that this is a scam mail?
1) Real email sent from Moneybookers always address you with your name like Dear, John Doe.
In most cases scam email uses your email address instead of your name like Dear, john.doe@gmail.com or in this latest case Dear customer,
2) Moneybookers will never give you any link in email that you will receive from them but will tell you to manually type in your browser their website name www.moneybookers.com
In most cases scam email most of the time gives you a link to click that takes you to a fake site where you usually enter your username and password.
3) Moneybookers login link starts with https:// which stands for a secured server that comes with security certificate that you can look in your browser.
In most cases scam email gives you link that starts with http:// which stands for a server without a validated security standards.
In this current scam mail they give you link http://withdrawal-moneybookers.com that don’t start with https:// nor is the name of website moneybookers.com
4) What surprised me that even Gmail didn’t see this mail as a scam like former scam mail that I also posted in May 2008 at http://bookiesniper.com/blog/?p=49
Looks like scammers found a new way to even trick Gmail so again go with your instinct and never click on any links that comes from online payment websites like Moneybookers, PayPal or similar.
Tips on how to minimize risk of identity theft in such phishing mails!
a) Don’t click on any link inside of such mails.
b) Create an email address at Google or if you have it already - START USING IT cause we see already in this scam mail that Google already put such mail in Spam folder with alert in red box that this is probably a scam mail. And Google even went a step further to make this fake http:// link inside of this scam mail inactive. Big applause for Google.
c) Take few minutes of your time to search at Google for potential scam alerts with Subject line in such scam mail as Search term at Google.
I hope somebody will benefit and be more cautious after reading this post.
