How to spot & save yourself from online fraud

Some spammers send fraudulent mass-messages designed to collect personal information, called 'spoofing' or 'password phishing.'

Here are a few ways you might recognize these messages:

• • They ask you to provide your username and password or other personal information (e.g. Social Security number, bank account number, PIN number, credit card number, mother's maiden name, or birthday). Even if they appear to be from a legitimate source, or contain an official-looking webpage, be careful. Spammers often ask for this information in an attempt to steal your Gmail address, your money, your credit, or your identity.

  • You might see a warning from Gmail when you open one of these messages. These phishing alerts operate automatically, much like spam filtering. Gmail's spam filters automatically divert messages that are suspected of being unwanted messages into 'Spam'. Similarly, Gmail's phishing alerts automatically display warnings with messages we suspect are phishing attacks so you know to exercise caution before providing any personal information.

You should always be wary of any message that asks for your personal information, or messages that refer you to a webpage asking for personal information. One thing to be sure of: Google or Gmail will never ask you to provide this information in an email; if the message asking for it claims to be from us, don't believe it.

Below are Snapshots of some scam messages that I received:

HOW CAN I TELL THAT THIS IS A SCAM\PHISHING ATTACK?

1. You can see that email is from unknown person

2. You can see that there are several email addresses that are unrelated to each other.

3. The email attachment is not a normal file, it has .ace attachment.

4. You can see that email has not been sent to  you directly, you are in cc: or bcc:

Here is another example of a Phishing Attempt: You receive a message from an unknown company or person asking you for a quotation. Here he is asking you to click a Link. This is suspicious as you may never have encountered any genuine buyer asking you to click on a link before ?

Click on the Drop Down arrow next to senders name to see the details. You will find that your email id is not there in the to field. This means that the message has been sent to several people using the BCC: (Blank Carbon Copy) option. You should not open such messages. 

All such messages should be Reported as Phishing attempts to Google in order to share the information quickly and protect yourself & others from such attempts. Click on the Down arrow at Top right corner of email and Click on Report Phishing.