Are You Ready For New Years Resolutions?

By Robert Sanborn

Happy holidays and what comes with it besides Black Friday, Small Shop Saturday, and Cyber Monday, is this flood of phishing and spam mail coming to my inbox. The more I use Outlook from Microsoft, the more I appreciate the help it gives me in deciphering those miserable emails that come in. This season will be a flood of bogus air ticket confirmations, shipping notices, Amazon purchases, and the like trying very hard to part me with my credit card numbers. Ahhh, I miss the days of Nigerian bank accounts and simple Viagra adds.  I still get an occasional Canadian Pharmacy ad but mostly this season has been the shipping notices.

Fortunately, Outlook makes it pretty easy to figure them out and to tell that they are not legitimate transactions.  Outlook 2007 and 2010 allows you to use the preview pane to see what is in the email message without it alerting the sender that there is a live body at this end of the message.  If I just hover the mouse/pointer over the link in the email message, it will tell me the actual URL that the message link is pointing to and they run the gamut from what should be legitimate sites in this country to websites all over the world.  If the “FedEx” message that I get has a link to a site in Russia, you can pretty well bet that it isn’t the real thing. Same with that “FedEx” message linking to a non Federal Express site in the US should also raise the same red flag. Or, how about just looking at the message with the FedEx logo at the top but it has a link to get a “Postal Receipt”.

My next favorite is what looks like a US Airways email telling me to confirm a ticket I never purchased. Again, just hover the pointer/mouse over the link in the message and you will see in the status bar at the bottom of the screen, the actual URL that you would be linking to and as you probably guessed by now, it definitely doesn’t point to US Airways.  Gotten them from Delta and American as well.

You get the idea. You should be following this process for any email you get that you did not expect to receive to see if it is legitimate or not.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss another scam and what you can do to protect yourself.