How to recognize phishing scams or emails?

Phishing email messages, websites and phone calls are designed by cybercriminals to steal money. This is done by cybercriminals and they do this by installing malicious software on your computer or by stealing personal information from your computer. However, cybercriminals also use social engineering so to convince you so that you install this malicious software or you hand over your personal information under some false pretenses. They do this by sending you email or they can call you on the phone or they can convince you to download something from a website.

How to recognize scams?

Also read: Top 10 Tips to Keep Your Children Safe Online!!!

 New scams are seemed to appear every day. Therefore scams can contain the following:

•  Promises of money for little or no effort
• Alarmist messages and threats of account closures
• Request to donate to a charitable organization after a disaster which has been in the news.
• Deals which sound very good to be true.
• Bad grammar and spelling mistakes

You might beware of phishing phone calls because cybercriminals might call you on the phone and offer you to help or solve your computer problems or sell you a software license. Once you have shown faith and if they have gained your trust, then cybercriminals might ask for your user name and password or ask you to go to a website to install software which will let them access your computer to fix it. Once you do this, after that your computer and your personal information will not be personal and confidential and be stolen by the cybercriminals.

If you receive a fake call then you should take down the caller’s information and should report to your local authorities.

Some of the popular phishing scams which you should be aware of are:

Lottery scams- You might receive messages which claim that you have won the Microsoft lottery. These messages might look like as they have come from a Microsoft executive. There is no such Microsoft lottery. You should delete this message.

Scams which use the Microsoft name or other well known companies- This scams include fake email messages or websites which use the Microsoft name. The email might claim that you have won a Microsoft contest and that Microsoft needs logon information or password. You should ignore all this.