Last updated: November 4, 2022
In recent years, emails have become a means of communication used by many people on a daily basis. It must be said that it is rather practical to use.
Except that here you doubt it, faced with this colossal number of messages sent, some saw money to be made and began to set up scams. Scammers have started using emails to trick you into giving them your personal and financial information. But there are several ways to protect yourself.
In this article, we give you all the tips for recognize these fake emails and avoid unpleasant surprises.
What is a fake email?
The idea of these fake emails is quite simple, it is to pretend to be people they are not. Today, everyone knows the famous fake draw emails, for example, that are circulating.
These emails, if they worked in the early days of the internet today, the vast majority of users manage to sense the scam coming before they even open the message. But as you can imagine, we did not stop there.
Indeed, the scammers then continued to refine their techniques and today one of the most common scams is to pretend to be services that they are not in order to make you lower your trust. From there, they can, for example, infect the computer with a virus. They can also force you to log into a fake site to retrieve your credentials that they can use to access more sensitive sites.
Finally, they can also pretend to be someone with the right to ask you for money hoping that you will give in to the threats and pay the amount demanded of you.
How to recognize a fake email?
Cybercriminals often update their techniques to keep abreast of the latest news or trends, but here are some common techniques used in fake spam emails. Phishing :
- Cybercriminals tell you that they have noticed suspicious activity or login attempts on your account.
- They inform you that there is a problem with your account or your payment information.
- They claim that your bank is asking you to confirm personal or financial information.
- They ask you to click on a link to make a payment.
- They trick you into thinking you can get a $1 iPhone.
- They trick you into submitting payment for goods or services you never ordered.
Here are two concrete examples of a fake email:
How to protect yourself from malicious emails?
German spam filters of your email provider can keep many malicious emails out of your inbox. But hackers always try to thwart these filters, so additional layers of protection can help.
Here are four ways to protect yourself against fake emails.
Never a public service or a bank will ask you for money via Paysafecard
It is this first case that we are going to deal with and one of the best-known examples of false emails on this subject is this email which tells you that your activity on the Internet has been reported in a survey of pedophilia.
They know that you watched prohibited sexual content and therefore ask you to pay a sum of money. The problem is that very often, this sum is a Paysafecard, a card that can be purchased at a tobacconist.
The advantage for scammers is that this card, once you have given the code, obviously leaves no trace! Therefore start from the following principle, if the police want to prosecute you, already, they will not be satisfied with a prepaid card. In addition, it will give you more conventional means of settling the sum.
Check the addresses to which you are directed
As we told you, the other type offake email scam very fashionable, it is the one where we will pretend to be an entity in order to steal your login information such as an email address and a password.
If either you do hack this account there is sometimes not very embarrassing, it becomes immediately more so if you have used the email account or the password for several other accounts because you have just given access to these to the scammer.
Therefore, the first golden rule is to never respond to any emails directly asking for your credentials. No service asks you directly, they know how to find you with other means if necessary.
The other rule is if you are redirected to a page for you to connect, make sure that the one in these emails corresponds to the official page and is not a site created to look like the real thing, until in the title (ebai.fr instead of ebay.fr for example).
Moreover, one of the fairly simple means of combating these fake links that lead you to pirate sites via emails, it's do the procedure directly from the site in question.
If you have any doubts about emails, call the service directly
The following trick that we are going to give you, it is more or less the same as the one we have just told you. Indeed, often the services that supposedly contact you by email have a telephone service.
From then on, take your identifier and call the service concerned directly and ask them if there is indeed a problem. If indeed this is the case, you will have someone directly in front of you to explain it to you and settle it.
If this is not the case, then not only will you have succeeded in thwarting an email attack, but in addition to that, the service concerned will be directly targeted. From then on, he can take steps to try to curb the problem.
Report fake email scam attempts to the Pharos platform
Finally, the last point we wanted to raise is that if you are the victim of an email scam, there is a platform in France where you will simply report it, la Pharos platform.
This will allow scams to be traced and on top of that, it can be useful if you ever plan to file a complaint against this scam. It's not magic, but it's currently one of the most effective ways to fight against these email scams.
Conclusion
Voila, you now know much more about email scams which are still very popular and which have improved so much in recent years that anyone can fall into it one day.
Do not tell yourself that you are above that, that you know the internet too well, because it is precisely these people who are too sure of themselves that these scammers intend to take advantage of to lead them into a trap. However, you now have some weapons to fight against them.