What is phishing, and why should I care?
No, it isn’t a misspelling, or a way to entertain yourself by playing a game on your computer. It isn’t a game at all, millions of people succumb to these well thought out and cleverly devised scams every year:
- You receive an e-mail from your bank, asking you to confirm a charge from a hotel that you have never been to.
- A credit card company sends you an e-mail telling you that you need to log in to your account within the next 24 hours to confirm your account details, or your account will be suspended.
- You get an e-mail from Amazon explaining that during their last account update they could not verify all of your account information, and that you need to log in to your account to verify that information.
- PayPal sends an e-mail telling you that they have reason to believe that your account has been hijacked by a third party, and that you need to log in to your account to verify your identity.
In all of these cases there are helpful links embedded in the e-mail, so that you can simply click here to quickly address the issue that is described.