Spot Fake Emails In Your Inbox, And Tell Them Apart From A Genuine Communication.
You should be able to spot fake emails in your inbox by taking the time to look carefully at any emails that have been sent to you, just because you may have been careful who you have given your email address to, does not mean that you will always receive e-mails that are genuine and have been sent from a legitimate source.
That new email in your inbox might look like that it has come from your bank or other reputable company that you have dealings with, but it could well be a fake email sent by a fraudster in an attempt to steal your log in details for your online banking account or other online accounts that you may have.
First of all look carefully at the way the email is written and ask yourself a couple of questions like, is it addressed to me? Does it have my full name or at least my Christian name in it? A fake email will start with the words ‘Dear Customer’, Dear Valued Customer or something similar.
Then look at the way it is written, check for grammar and spelling, below is a sample of one that I had received recently and was exactly as follows;
Hello custumer,
Verify you’re account informations !
We hope you enjoyed your stay with us .
We face some problems in our systems.To fix it you must verify youre account .
Please sing into your account below
The way that the word ‘customer’ had been spelt, had been written with no capital ‘C’, and the fact that it was addressed as ‘hello customer’ and not to me using my name, was a dead give away to me that this was a fake email.
Try reading the email and see if it is written in the Queens English, what I mean by that is if it sounds like the following;
”Verify you’re account informations”
The sentence above does not sound like the way someone with good English, grammar and diction would say it, i.e there is a letter ‘s’ on the word ‘information’ and the whole sentence just would not be spoken like that, also there is poor grammar and spelling. Remember that the email is supposed to be from your bank or other organisation and should be written in good English.
Other traits to consider are the email address that the fake email was sent to, please think about which of your inboxes you are checking if you have more than one email address, you may find that the fake email has been sent to an email address that is not associated with your bank or other organisation so therefore it would definitely be a fake.
The fraudster will always try to get you to click on a link in order to ”verify your details’, Banks and other companies will never ask you to do this, by following the link inside the fake email will lead you to a fake website that has been created by the fraudster to trick you into entering your login details and so you will be giving your details to the fraudster so please do not click on any links inside a suspicious email.
To check that you are on a legitimate website look at the web address or URL in your web browsers address bar and in particular the first part of the URL as it will begin ‘https’, the letter ‘s’ present in the ‘https’ indicates that you are on a secure web server, there will also be a closed or locked padlock icon present and if you hover your mouse on the padlock icon a text window will appear to indicate that the website has been verified, more info is available if you click on the padlock icon.
If none of this is present then you are most likely on a fake website. If you are in doubt about any links, clear your cookies from your web browser, and then type the URL into the address bar in the browser address bar, URL’s are unique so make sure you type the address correctly.
Have you ever received a fake email in your inbox? If so would you like to share your experiences by leaving a comment below?
