Is This Email For Real?
In this week’s “Ask Pogue,” three people write to ask the same thing:
Kerri: I am forwarding an email I received this morning. I am thinking this email is not really from Yahoo. I tried searching to see if Yahoo was really upgrading, but I haven’t found anything. Can you help me with this?
Steven: I recently got an email from Yahoo support that said I will soon be unable to send email because I am about to reach my 2 GB limit. When I go to my account, I can’t find any reference to a 2 GB data plan.
Carol: I have an email in my in box that is supposed to be from Technical Support telling me I have to fill out information including a PIN to keep my email from being deleted.
Yes, I know I’ve written extensively on this topic before — but a few people write to me every single day, asking me to help them decide if these “Yahoo” messages are genuine.
They’re not genuine. Scam, scam, scam. All of those are scams.
They’re phishing scams, to be precise. Here’s what that means.
In this video, I give my readers some insight into how to spot a phishing scam by yourself. You might start with the look; many of the fake Yahoo emails have the old Yahoo logo.
Or you might notice all the spelling and grammatical mistakes. English is a second language for most of the people who perpetrate these scams.
Above all, you can point your mouse to the “Click here for more information” link without clicking — and you’ll see the actual webpage that you’re about to open. Most of the time, the address hiding behind the link looks nothing like yahoo.com, so you know it’s fake.
Of course, Yahoo isn’t the only company whose name is taken in vain by phishing scammers; you frequently see these emails coming from “eBay,” “PayPal,” “Amazon,” “Google,” and banks. But all of them work the same way, and all of them still trick thousands of Americans every year.
If you ever have a doubt about any email, don’t click a link in it. Instead, go to the website in question directly by typing in the address yourself in your browser, or by clicking on a bookmark. Look for alerts once you’re logged in to the real site.
Let’s fight back with knowledge!
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