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Original article source: 8 phishing email scams to watch out for this holiday season. Show comments. Advertisement. Advertisement. Holiday Shopping Guides. See all. AOL.
The best way to protect yourself against email phishing scams is to avoid falling victim to them in the first place. "Simply never take sensitive action based on emails sent to you," Steinberg says.
Phishing and business email compromise scams generally involve an element of email spoofing. Email spoofing has been responsible for public incidents with serious business and financial consequences. This was the case in an October 2013 email to a news agency which was spoofed to look as if it was from the Swedish company Fingerprint Cards.
Currently it is unclear how far back the origin of scam letters date. The oldest reference to the origin of scam letters could be found at the Spanish Prisoner scam. [1] This scam dates back to the 1580s, where the fictitious prisoner would promise to share non-existent treasure with the person who would send him money to bribe the guards.
Email fraud (or email scam) is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual using email as the vehicle. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to de fraud people, just as telephony and paper mail were used by previous generations.
Unsolicited Bulk Email (Spam) AOL protects its users by strictly limiting who can bulk send email to its users. Info about AOL's spam policy, including the ability to report abuse and resources for email senders who are being blocked by AOL, can be found by going to the Postmaster info page .
Scams and confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark".
For scams conducted via written communication, baiters may answer scam emails using throwaway email accounts, pretending to be receptive to scammers' offers. [4]Popular methods of accomplishing the first objective are to ask scammers to fill out lengthy questionnaires; [5] to bait scammers into taking long trips; to encourage the use of poorly made props or inappropriate English-language ...