Email credit card scams -- any defense besides common sense?

[rw120555]

In the last two weeks I have received emails, purportedly from Paypal and e-gold, telling me they were reviewing my account and asking me to log in. In both cases, they were actually scams designed to steal account info, by sending you to lookalike pages that were awfully good imitations. I didn't fall for either one (the fact that I don't have an e-gold account is one thing that made me suspicious!) but I can see where others would. There was a similar scam with Best Buy last week.

One thing that e-gold says on its web page, which I think is quite good, is "E-GOLD WILL NEVER SEND YOU AN HTML EMAIL WITH A HYPERTEXT LINK ASKING YOU TO CLICK ON THE LINK TO ACCESS YOUR ACCOUNT!" It occurs to me that I get a lot of email with links, e.g. my credit card says my monthly statement is now ready -- those links are handy but it would be easy for somebody to scam you if you weren't careful.

So, from now on, I think I will be more careful than ever with email links. Besides that and common sense, does anybody have any other ideas? I don't think my kids know any key account info, but if they did I could see them falling for this (my daughter says people on Neopets have tried to steal things in similar ways!). I don't suppose there is anything like a Net Nanny for adults and their credit cards, is there?

Also, any idea who to report such things to, besides the companies involved? Is there a fed agency that would want this kind of stuff forwarded to it (and even if it did, would it be too overwhelmed to do anything about it?) Thanks. RW

 

[Saltin]

I'm glad you asked! Yes there is a way to protect yourself. Please send me your credit card number via email and I will send you my "Scam Protection Plug-in for Windows"

It's great!

 

[Soybomb]

I usually just go to www.arin.net and look up the IP address the email was sent from and the IP address of the host (view the message's source) the fake form is on. I then email the abuse contact on both hosts and let them know someone is trying to run a scam off their services.

 

[hjo3]

I read all my e-mail in plain text. Not only does it prevent me from having to look at some really bad porn when I click the wrong message, but I see the whole URL of links provided, so I catch the difference between http://www.ebay.com and http://133.23.55.17/scam.html.

 

[Mucman]

I think there is no way to defend against anything if you don't have common sense Just consider the ones that fall for
it part of Darwins great plan

 

[nolovenohope]

Originally posted by: hjo3
I read all my e-mail in plain text. Not only does it prevent me from having to look at some really bad porn when I click the wrong message, but I see the whole URL of links provided, so I catch the difference between http://www.ebay.com and http://133.23.55.17/scam.html.

How do you do that hjo3? Do tell, I am interested.

 

[hjo3]

Well, it's different for various mail clients, but in Outlook Express (which I use), you can just go Tools > Options > Read, and there's a checkbox to check that says "Read all messages in plain text."

 

[nolovenohope]

Ah, thank you hjo. That definately helps me because I hate it when I am going through my messages at work and run over a porn e-mail and the pictures come up. Thanks again!

 

[hjo3]