I think I have a pretty good eye for spotting email scams and other nasty forms of correspondence. After all, I’ve received a lot of them, and they tend to fit into one of several categories:
Viruses Disguised as E-Greetings
These really annoy me, because they’ve made some people afraid to open any e-greetings, and I used to enjoy sending them. Keep in mind that a legitimate e-greeting will nearly always say something like “Janet (or whoever) has sent you a greeting” in the subject line. If instead of identifying the sender, it just says “somebody” or “a friend,” then you should just delete it without opening it.
Phishing
Emails supposedly from PayPal, a bank, or other financial institution, asking you to confirm your password. Although they usually look pretty legit, if you mouse over the link in the email (don’t click on it!) you can see that rather than https://www.paypal.com, it looks something like http://www.something.com/paypal. These messages should always be ignored and deleted. To report the sender, check the website of the bank or company they claim to represent for instructions – generally you forward the email to abuse@paypal.com or something similar. It’s a good idea to include the message header, as this will show them where the message actually originated from. The method for displaying the message header will depend on the email platform you’re using, but you can find a fairly comprehensive list at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22454.
It usually looks something like this:
Domain Renewal Notifications
Every year, at least one of my website clients asks about a letter they received from the Domain Registry of Canada asking them to renew their domain name. The letters look very official, almost as though they were issued by the government. If you have a website, you need to be aware that although this is a legitimate company, they use unethical means to contact clients of other registrars to convince them to switch to their much higher priced service. This is well documented – simply type the words “Domain Registry of Canada scam” into Google, and you’ll get nearly 200,000 hits.
CRA Mail Scam
This is a new one to me, which was brought to my attention by one of my clients. Apparently, some Canadians have received a letter fraudulently identified as coming from the Canada Revenue Agency, which asks the recipient to fax or email information about their bank accounts and passports. This is pretty scary, as I think people are much more likely to have faith in a letter that comes in the mail than an email, especially if it appears to be from the government. In addition, the 30% or so of Canadians who don’t use the internet (as of 2005; it may be lower now) may be less aware of this type of scam, increasing the chance that they’ll become a victim. For more information about this scam, go to http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/nwsrm/lrts/2008/l080818-eng.html.
If you’re not familiar with the above scenarios, you owe it to yourself to learn more about this subject, so you can protect your personal information and your computer system.