Gone Phishing
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Posted by Web Team, February 15, 2005
View all posts for February 2005
There’s a new scam in town much more sophisticated than the “Nigerian Letter” scam (see the FBI description). It’s called phishing and here’s how it works.
This new approach starts with an email purporting to be from a bank, ISP or other company with which you may do business. The email presents an apparently important reason for you to “confirm” information with them and gives you a link to an official-looking online form.
If you fill out the form, you are giving personal and financial information like credit card information and social security numbers to the scammers. This can lead to charges on your accounts or even identity theft.
Precautions
- Be suspicious
- Examine web addresses (URLs or Universal Resource Locators) in emails to see if they look like legitimate addresses
- In general, if a URL appears in anemail, type it into your browser rather than clicking (what you see maynot be what you get, and recent uses of foreign character sets allowsites to trick your browser.)
- If in doubt, check with the Help Desk (x2222, helpdesk@simmons.edu)
If you think someone’s phishing for you:
- Let the community know by letting us know (x2222, helpdesk@simmons.edu)
- Let the company know
- File a police report
