Here are the tricks to avoid being scammed via email!
It's quite easy to spot a fraudulent message from a company you've never dealt with. But it's more tricky if it seems to come from a company you're already a customer of. Not only is it very similar in appearance to a legitimate e-mail, but it also urges you to act quickly, urgently, and without thinking. And it's by playing both games that scammers manage to fleece their victims.
What to look for in your e-mails to avoid being scammed by fraudulent messages
- So, if you have any doubts, the first thing to do is to carefully examine the sender's e-mail address, such as name@company.com. It doesn't always appear, but just click on the header at the top of the message to display it in plain text. Concentrate especially on the domain name, the part after the @. If it matches the company name, it's a good sign. If it doesn't - if it's @gmail.com, for example, or some other e-mail service unrelated to the company name - it's a scam. All the more so if the first part of the e-mail address contains the name of a private individual, or if it's fanciful. A few real-life examples: yetdg@grofer.in for a message supposedly from the Post, support@condenastframe.awsapps.com for Vinted, etc. Nothing to do with the alleged senders!
- Some clever crooks buy domain names that closely resemble official names, except for a few details: letters added or reversed (amazone.com, fanc.com, vintd.com, etc.), counting on misreadings. Some go so far as to use a capital 'i' in place of a lowercase l, or a capital O in place of a zero. This is a technique known as typosquatting and requires special care. So beware, even when the address looks very much like a legitimate one!
- The best thing to do when you receive a suspicious message seeming to come from a company or service of which you are a real customer is to manually go to your customer area, without following the link mentioned in the e-mail, to check whether you have an official message.
What to do if you have received a strange e-mail
Before you do anything, check this little detail to see if it's from a reliable sender or a scammer trying to rip you off.
Like everyone else, you're bound to receive spam at your e-mail address. In fact, despite the detection measures put in place by Internet service providers and e-mail services (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.), unwanted messages manage to bypass the filters and pile up by the dozen in your inbox. Most are automatically filed in a special folder (Spam or Unwanted), but others manage to slip into your main inbox, among legitimate messages.
Often, these are commercial messages from companies you don't know, but which have bought your e-mail address from the companies of which you are a customer. These are annoying, but not dangerous, messages offering promotions, competitions, gifts, and so on.
On the other hand, you should beware of other messages, especially those of an alarmist nature. This is phishing, a technique that involves impersonating an official organization or company to scam you. The trap is as simple as it is effective: the message, which adopts the graphic codes of the supposed sender, informs you of a problem with an order, a subscription, or any other anxiety-inducing reason. And it invites you to follow a link to resolve the problem as quickly as possible. But don't click on this link, as it will take you to a trapped web page that looks like an official page, but is only used to retrieve your personal information (account ID, password, postal address, bank details, credit card number, etc.) or, in the worst case, to immediately charge you for a transaction or delivery.