What is a Phishing scam?

A phishing attack uses scam emails and fake websites in order to get people to reveal sensitive personal details (such as your login details). The most common type of phishing scam involves emails sent from supposed financial institutes.

An example would be a bank sending you an email saying that changes have been made to your account - they then prompt you to click a link to go and check your account. When you click the link you are sent to a website that may look like the real banks website but is in fact a fake. When you try and login your details are captured and your security therefore compromised.

Signs of a phishing scam

• Firstly your bank or financial institute should never ask you to click a link in an email to go to their site.
• Look at the email address of the sender. Often it will be similar, but slightly different from the real address. For example if your online banks website is www.authenticbank.com, you would expect the email to have the same address, eg. support@authenticbank.com. A phishing email would be from a different address. Sometimes the address is completely different eg. support@fakebank.com, but sometimes there are only very slightly differences, eg. sales@autheticbank.
• If you do click a link in a phishing email you may notice that the site you get sent to is slightly different to the real site. A sure give-away is that that site URL will be different. As with the sender email address (mentioned above) this difference my be only very slight
• Generally these types of emails will end up in your 'Spam' folder.
• The email is often riddled with spelling and grammatical mistakes. Be aware though that the better phishing scams can look rather convincing.

Steps to avoid phishing scams

• Don't click links in emails that send you to sites that then request you to log in.
• Type the sites URL into the browser so that you can be sure it is the correct site you are going to.
• There are some browser settings that you can change to help you detect sites that may be unsafe.
• Some anti-virus software also helps detect if you are going to web sites with security concerns. You can get free anti-virus and online security software here.