Have you received an email lately that has informed you of a long lost, previously unknown relative who left you millions? How about one letting you know you won the UK lottery or a notification that your account has been suspended from a financial institution? These all are all elements of popular email scams.
Why do these scammers keep trying? Obviously it’s because it must be profitable for them. As careful and as smart as we all are, there are still people that open these scam emails and click on bogus links just to find out if it could be true. Then, to make matters worse they provide sensitive information to see if there really is money waiting for them.
Now, I’m not talking about emails that promise a great low price on a vacation or the newest miracle floor sweeper. Yes, those are annoying but they’re usually far less insidious than the scam emails that try to lure you with promises of riches or scare you with threats of inconvenience or even danger.
Here are three (painfully obvious) quick tips you can share with friends, family and others who may be less-informed, overly optimistic or just plan curious about these emails scams.
- You never entered the UK, Spanish or Nigerian lottery, and you don’t live in any of those places.
- You don’t use the bank, credit card company or service that claims your account has been suspended, but then prompts you to click on a link.
- You’ve done your genealogy homework and you don’t have any long-lost relatives who passed away recently and wanted to leave you millions of dollars. If they felt they could leave you millions of dollars.
Here are some other quick tips you can share to help others see through the rouse.
- The FROM name on email may say Truliant, but the FROM email address is info@airportdebit.com or truliant-account-info@truliant.com.quickserv.ch. Those are not valid email address for Truliant.
- Also the links in the email, you know, the link you have to click on to ‘restore’ your account status, yes, that fake link… it actually points to some other destination, such as Truliantcredituion.accounts.imfq3d.cn/account-restore.htm or some other bogus address. You can hover your mouse over the link to see the real web address (sometimes) or look at the email raw content to see where the link is really pointing. Best bet here is to just not click on the link at all if you have any doubt that it’s not legit.
- Maybe you DO use that financial institution from which you received the notification of a suspended account, but I’d like to let you in on some not-so-secret information… if your account is actually locked or suspended, you will not receive an email. Anytime you see an email telling you that your account has been suspended, consider it a scam. When in doubt, go straight to the website where you normally log in and try to sign on.
- Atrocious grammar. We’ve all written grammatically inferior emails before, yes even here at Truliant, but scam emails are notorious for goofy wording and spelling. Sometimes you don’t even have to open the email to spot the grammar mistakes. Believe it or not, many of these emails come from other countries, and English may not be their primary language and they don’t bother to put the email through quality assurance.
There are so many more tips we could share, but let’s start simple. Until we (as a collective group of humans) can avoid email scams that ploy to gather our information, penetrate our security and in turn steal our hard-earned money, we need to prevent more of these unsuspecting individuals from the enticing email subject lines that promise glamour, money or disaster.
About the Author: Chad Scribner has a background in Web development and is the manager of eServices at Truliant.
