Important Tips To Identify Phishing Emails Or Fraud Emails

Anyone could be the victim of phishing email who does not know what phishing mail is and how it works. Phishing mail is nothing but fake mail sent to you from some fraud organization or by a person to provide your personal information. This kind of phishing mail generally offers that you have own a lottery of huge amount or your email id has been selected for a prize. They could ask you to provide your bank account information or initiation charges or your credit card information.

Here are some tips which could help you to identify phishing mail or fraud email:

Subject contents some kind of offer-

Most of the phishing mails come with subject like “Congrats 12-12-2015” or “Company name with Prize amount” or “$5000000000” etc. It could be anything exiting which will attract you to open the mail.  Sometimes it could be blank as well.

Message body looks colorful with many suspicious links-

Inside the mail there could be many misleading links with different colors. Congrats written in bold color and highlighted with different colors. In message body you could find many grammatical mistakes and false company name. There could not be any relation between company mentioned and the mail sent from.

Message contains attachment and asks to provide bank details or credit card information-

In many phishing mails, mail comes with attachment in pdf or in word document. Inside the doc they will mention that you have won a lottery or prize with amount and to claim that amount, provide bank account with many more information. Also it could be mentioned that to process prize amount you will have to pay some initiation amount. Also it could be mentioned to provide your credit card information, passport information etc.

URL provided could be fake or not related to subject-

Might be in the message body or in attachment they provide some fake URLs or misleading URLs to win your confidence and to make the message more realistic.

They can offer you as lucky winner of lottery-

Mail comes with a great prize or lucky winner of a lottery. It could be like this – “Your email id has been selected as a lucky winner”. Message seems like sent from a big company i.e. coca cola or reserve bank etc. Also it could have fake signature in the attached document.

To convince might be shown a false Cheque as screen shot-

Sometimes they attach screen shot of fake Cheque with amount or example of any other person’s name. Cheque will look like real bank Cheque.

The amount could be shown a huge and in different currency-

In the message body or in attachment or in subject they could mention the winning amount. Sometimes it could be any country currency like US dollar or UK Pound.

These are few suggestions that if you find these kind of phishing mails-

• Never share your bank account information to unknown or suspicious mail.
• Never share your personal information like date of birth, pan card, any id information, passport etc.
• Better don’t open the attachment itself.

Hope this will help you to identify phishing mail and to prevent you from happening any kind of phishing mail fraudulent.