How To Tell If An Email Is Real Or Phish
How can I tell if an email is real or "phish"?
The ability to whether an email is legitimate email or is an email that's phishing for information is very difficult for a lemon to tell. There's a lot of resource information imbedded in an email that most people don't know how to get to. However there are a number of things that can give us clues as to whether or not an email is legitimate or not. One of the very first things is does it address you by your name, or does it just say dear customer, or cardholder, or member? That's not very personal. Big companies have software that personalize this information. No legitimate business is going to ask you for super sensitive information, especially via an email. In fact if you pay attention to the policies of most of these companies, whether they're banks, anything to do with finance, they'll state that they will never ask for password, and never to give one out if you have been asked for one. You'll notice in the body of the email will be a link, and the link will take you to a page where you're supposed to update your information or whatever it is that they've requested of you. If you look carefully at the web address more often then not you'll notice that it's actually slightly different if not completely different then the organization that's requesting the information. So for instance if it's Citibank maybe it's Citibank with two I's or Citibank with a y, or it's not Citibank.com but it has .us, or .info. Something like that, something fishy enough for you to know. Also look for smaller subtle things such as; incorrect grammar, incorrect spelling, poor structure and format of these pages. These are supposedly large organizations that know how to put together a letter or request. Finally evaluate whether or not you've ever done any business with this organization to begin with, because if you haven't there's absolutely no reason they should have any of your information.
