Now I’m not sure about all of you, but recently I have been getting an abnormal amount of email scams. And I just want to get the word out there that you should be careful about who you share your information with. Information like your email. I want to help spread awareness and teach you how to identify these devious emails and how to deal with them.
How to Identify Email Scams
Generally, you would have received an email out of what seems to be no where claiming to be from some sort of company that you recognize. Like Walmart, Best Buy, or Norton. These are just examples. Now, there are several different ways to identify these email scams. First of all, the email sender address used looks like it is from a personal email. You probably already know what an email from the company actually looks like. For example, if you know you received an email from Walmart before because you ordered stuff online and received an order confirmation email, you already know what a standard Walmart email looks like. You can compare to see where the email was sent from.
Another way you can identify these phishing scams is buy the content of the email. Sometimes the email will be super short and most likely have an attachment. The email will most likely say that you were billed or about to be billed something, and or money has already been taken out of your account. And when you click on the attachment it will show you a bill. Now this may look official, but don’t be fooled. It may have your name, but there are several things you may notice that are off about it. With anything that was paid for, it should have something like your address or the last 4 digits of your account number. But these fake bill notices won’t have that.
These emails will most likely have a phone number to call for questions you may have. DO NOT CALL THAT NUMBER! Go to the company website and double check the number on the site versus what was given to you. This will also indicate the email was fake.
What to Do About These Emails?
So now you can identify these email scams. What do you do now? Well, I know you would be worried about receiving these emails. So to ease your mind here’s what you can do. First, you can check that these emails don’t have any other personal information like your account number, address, or payment information. Then you can check your bank to see if any amount was actually taken out, or for any other suspicious activity. If you’re still worried, you can call the company. From the number provided on the website, not the email.
Doing this will ease your mind. And now that you are no longer worried about that we can move on. Before just deleting the email, you should make sure to report the email as either spam or phishing. To do this, at least for Gmail, click the email. On the right hand side you’ll see the 3 menu dots across from the email sender. Click that and then select the appropriate action. And there you have it. You should be receiving fewer and fewer over time as you do this.
On another note. If one of these emails does happen to have some personal information, then you should take some extra steps to make sure everything is okay. I would suggest checking the dark web to see if your info is there. And if so, to then get it removed. One way to get a free dark web scan is by going to Experian. They offer a free scan and can remove your info from other sites too. You might also want to consider identity theft protection. Lifelock can help with that.
Response Magic