BBTB: A simple guide to avoiding online scammers.
By:BBS on Sun, Sep 13, 2020 06:30:52 PST | Viewed 1257 times
I am going to talk a bit about online scamming and simple things you can do to protect yourself from them. Firstly I will discuss a practice called phishing (like fishing). This is a scam where a person pretends to be an official from a website or service and contacts you through email, telephone, etc. I am going to talk about email and web phishing. The best thing to do if something seems too good to be true or seems a bit off (like from an email for example) is simply check the address that sent it. If someone is pretending to be a Facebook employee and you get an email that is from noreply@facebook.co.com or something that is a bit off, just report it as spam and be done with it. As you can see, that is not the official Facebook domain, which is facebook.com so anything from another domain can be safely ignored/deleted/reported.
These types of emails are even a bit more tricky if you are not paying attention. Often times they include a link to a website, and again using Facebook as an example, will have a duplicate page set up to look like Facebook, which again will not be on the official facebook.com domain. The email will say something along the lines of: "There has been suspicious activity on your account, please login and verify it is/isn't you." Then they include a link to a fake version of Facebook.
Beware! If you log into a site like this, you can kiss your account goodbye or at least spend some fun time dealing with Facebook customer service trying to reclaim your account. Normally, a non-scamming site (like mine) will encrypt information like your password and nobody that runs the site would be able to decrypt it to tell what your password is. However, if you "log in" to the spoofed site, they don't use encryption, they just snag your real login information and then they have your password. They can then log in, change your credentials so that you can't access it and you have lost your account. Your account wasn't "hacked" in this circumstance, you just foolishly logged into a site that wasn't Facebook and they stole your login information, no hacking required. So beware out there my friends and be cautious about what you click, log in to etc. Surf safely, don't fall for something like this when it is so easy to spend two seconds to verify that it is coming from an official source.
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