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• Fake email addresses - Malicious actors sometimes send from email addresses made to look like an official email address but in fact is missing a letter(s), misspelled, replaces a letter with a lookalike number (e.g. “O” and “0”), or originates from free email services that would not be used for official communications.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
Receiving a call, email or letter from a company purporting to be a debt collector can spark alarm. Before disclosing any information, look for these eight signs of a fake debt collection scam. 1.
Email scams posing as the Internal Revenue Service were also used to steal sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. [64] Social networking sites are a prime target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft ; [ 65 ] In 2007, 3.6 million adults lost US$3.2 billion due to phishing attacks. [ 66 ]