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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.
• 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.
Phishing scams happen when you receive an email that looks like it came from a company you trust (like AOL), but is ultimately from a hacker trying to get your information. All legitimate AOL Mail will be marked as either Certified Mail, if its an official marketing email, or Official Mail, if it's an important account email. If you get an ...
AOL Mail is focused on keeping you safe while you use the best mail product on the web. One way we do this is by protecting against phishing and scam emails though the use of AOL Official Mail. When we send you important emails, we'll mark the message with a small AOL icon beside the sender name.
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 ]
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.
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied; these include fake franchises, real estate "sure things", get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, foreign exchange fraud, Nigerian money scams, fraudulent treasure hunts, and charms and talismans.
Make Money Fast (stylised as MAKE.MONEY.FAST) is a title of an electronically forwarded chain letter created in 1988 which became so infamous that the term is often used to describe all sorts of chain letters forwarded over the Internet, by e-mail spam, or in Usenet newsgroups. In anti-spammer slang, the name is often abbreviated "MMF".