Over the years, many people have come to me with the same worry: “I just got an email and I don’t know if I can trust it.” They are describing one of the pests of our time:

Phishing

The word “phishing” comes from fishing. Someone is fishing for your passwords, your email logins and anything tied to money. Typically, the message pretends to be from a service you know — a bank or a streaming site — and claims you must fix an urgent problem right now.

A doctored link then sends you to a copy of that company’s website. You type in your bank details, card number or password. Moments later, your money or your account is gone.

Here is an example from today. It wanted me to believe my Netflix membership was about to be cancelled.

As it happens, I was not an easy target, because I do not have a Netflix account. So how do you tell a genuine email and link from a fake one?

First, click on the email address to reveal the real sender.

The message claims to come from Netflix. However, click the sender’s name and you see support@blog.stipender.com, which has nothing to do with Netflix. On top of that, the mail program has already flagged it as suspected junk.

Then there is that bright red “Restart Membership” button. What happens if you click it? Don’t! Instead, hover your cursor over a link to reveal where it really goes.

In this case the address is “guiseppemondo.com” — again, nothing to do with Netflix.

More Phishing

Another trick uses a link that appears to belong to your bank but leads somewhere else. Say you get an email with a link to your bank, and the text looks completely genuine. Now hover your cursor over it:

It turns out to be a fake. Yes, the address contains “abcbank”, but the part that counts is the main domain, just before the final dot. Here that is “hackme.co”. (Incidentally, “.co” is the country code for Colombia.)

Not sure if a link or email is genuine? Contact Tekwizard and we can help you check it out.