Phishing, or methods of obtaining people’s personal information such as passwords and credit cards in order to fleece them, is big business. This type of scam, which usually works by sending e-mails with supposed links to real web sites (often Ebay, Amazon, banks or other merchants), claims millions of incredulous victims each year. An article in the New York Times suggests that more than 3.5 million Americans lost money to phishing scams in the year ending August, 2007. This represents more than $3 billion dollars!
There are many phishing methods, but the most common are e-mails leading users to bogus web sits that look real. (Of course, it’s simple to copy most of a web page and direct it to a different server.) Users generally enter credit card numbers, thinking that they are doing so on their bank’s web site, for example, and only find out, when they get their next bill, that they’ve been duped.
The best protection against phishing is intelligence: neither your bank, nor any online merchant, will send you an e-mail asking you to log into your account and give your credit card number. If you have doubts about e-mails, check the URLs that appear in your browser – because these e-mails often hide malicious URLs behind seemingly valid links.
Intego Personal Antispam offers protection from phishing, by spotting URLs that don’t match the visible links, and shunting these messages into a spam folder. This helps you keep phishing e-mails from ending up in your inbox. But be careful, also, of web sites that may lead you astray. Some sites seem to link to valid online retailers or banks, but actually lead to bogus sites. Again, check the URLs carefully before entering any confidential information.
