Don’t get fooled.
Today I got an e-mail message from American Express. It said, in part:
During our regualry scheduled accounts maintenance and verification procedures,
we have detected a slight error regarding your American Express Account.
This might be due to one of the following reasons:
1. A recent change in your personal information (i.e. address changing)
2. Submitting invalid information during the initial sign up process.
4. Multiple failed logins in your personal account.
3. An inabillity to accurately verify your selected option of payment due to an internal error within our system.
Please update and verify your information by clicking the following link:
Continue To American Express Online Update Form
*If you account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to access your account will be restricted.
Thank you,
American Express , Billing Department.
The type was tiny, which is probably why I didn’t notice the typos and spelling/grammar mistakes. Or perhaps I didn’t notice them because I’ve become so accustomed to skimming incoming mail rather than reading it.
The message looked official. It had the Amex logo and used their normal color schemes. But what really made it look genuine was the note near the bottom:
E-mail intended for your account.
If you are concerned about the authenticity of this message, please click here or call the phone number on the back of your credit card. If you would like to learn more about e-mail security or want to report a suspicious e-mail, click here
Note: If you are concerned about clicking links in this e-mail, the American Express mentioned above can be accessed by typing https://www.americanexpress.com directly into your browser.
The hint that this wasn’t as legitimate as it seemed came when I pointed to the link to supposedly update my account information. The URL that appeared in a yellow box in my e-mail client consisted of an IP address followed by /home.americanexpress.com/
.
Of course, the e-mail message wasn’t real. When I typed http://www.americanexpress.com/
into my Web browser and logged into my account, there was no indication of any problem.
Phishing, Defined
Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia, defines phishing as:
In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites (Youtube, Facebook, Myspace), auction sites (eBay), online banks (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase), online payment processors (PayPal), or IT Administrators (Yahoo, ISPs, corporate) are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose URL and look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.
My spam protection software is very good at weeding out phishing attempt messages, so I rarely see them. This one almost fooled me. If I’d been suckered in like so many probably were today, I would have clicked the link and entered my American Express login information in the screen that appeared. That information would have been captured in the phishing net and used to access my American Express account online.
It Isn’t PayPal
One of the Web sites I maintain is for a friend of mine who makes and sells helicopter ground handling wheels: HelicopterWheels.com. He’s an older guy who’s only been using computers for a few years. When I set up the original site, he asked me to set up online ordering. I’ll be the first to admit that I know little about setting up ecommerce solutions. So I set him up with the easiest and most secure method of accepting payments that I knew: PayPal.
Now PayPal has a bad reputation with some folks and I’m really not interested in hearing reader complaints about it. I use PayPal for my online ordering needs and although it isn’t a perfect solution, it does work and it seems safe enough to me.
Unfortunately, my friend received an e-mail message telling him that he had to verify some PayPal settings. The message was a phishing scam and my friend fell for it. He got hit for a bunch of money — which I’m not sure if he recovered. He immediately blamed PayPal and had me take the Buy Now buttons off his site.
I felt bad for him. After all, I’d recommended PayPal. But I’m also not the kind of person who gets sucked in by phishing schemes. I assumed he wasn’t either. I was wrong.
Don’t Get Caught
So here’s the only rule you need to prevent yourself from becoming the victim of a phishing scam:
Never click a link in any e-mail message.
If you get a message from your bank or credit card company or PayPal or any other service that requires you to enter a user ID and password to access it, do not click any link in that message. Instead, go directly to the site by typing the URL into your browser’s Address bar or using a Bookmark/Favorite that you’ve already set up. If there is a legitimate problem with your account that requires your attention, you’ll find out after logging in the safe way.
Of course, there are plenty of clues that can help you identify phishing attempts:
- Messages not addressed to your name. For example, Dear Cardholder instead of Dear Maria Langer.
- Typographical, spelling, and grammar errors in the e-mail message. Do you think American Express would spell regularly wrong?
- Messages sent to an e-mail address that you did not register with the organization supposedly sending the e-mail message to you. For example, the message I got today was sent to my Flying M Air e-mail account, which is not on file with American Express.
- URLs that point to IP addresses rather than recognizable domain names. For example,
http://35.32.185.43/account
rather than http://www.americanexpress.com/account
.
But you don’t have to worry about any of this. Just follow the golden rule listed above. Here it is again, in case you’ve forgotten: Never click a link in any e-mail message.
If you follow this rule, you should stay safe from phishing schemes.
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