Detect phishing emails: the best tips
Related Videos: Security Awareness Quick Tip: How to Identify and Avoid Email Phishing Scams - Part 1 (May 2024).
Phishing emails are relatively easy to identify. We'll tell you the most important tips.
How to recognize the phishing emails
If a phishing email lands in your mailbox, you will not always recognize it at first glance. But with a little caution and a little attention you can recognize the mails. We present some of the features again in the gallery below in detail pictures.
- Pay attention to the sender. "PayPal" or "Amazon" may appear as the sender in the email, but if you view the details, you will see the complete email address. If this is not plausible, it is a first warning sign. However, the sender can also be falsified - ie even if the email address ends at amazon.com, for example, you cannot yet be on the safe side.
- Another indication of a phishing email: If you have logged in to PayPal with a Hotmail account, for example, but the PayPal email is delivered to your t-online.de account.
- Phishing emails are often sent in foreign languages. Then you can be skeptical. If the email is written in German, but it is bristling with spelling or grammatical errors, this is also often a sure sign of fraud.
- If you click on a link in the mail, pay attention to the URL of the page accessed. Often it's just small spelling mistakes that don't catch our eye. A look at the imprint of the website you visit often helps. In an extra practical tip, we will tell you about other features of phishing sites.
- Whenever you receive an email with a link and then have to enter your login data with a password, this is a sign that it is a phishing email. Your bank, PayPal or Amazon will never send emails asking you to confirm your details and enter passwords.
- You will be contacted personally by email from almost all shopping portals or banks. If the email says "Dear Sir or Madam" or "Dear User", this is an indication that the email is a scam.
- If you receive an email asking you to act urgently and you are given a deadline, exercise caution. You should also be taken aback by threats, for example "Your credit card will be blocked if ...".
Beware of the current, new phishing scam
A brazen attempt at phishing is currently going around with Gmail accounts. Here you will receive an email with an apparent PDF as an attachment.
- If you want to click on the attachment, a pop-up window opens, asking you to enter your Google data and then log in to Google. In fact, this redirect has nothing to do with Google, but is a fake page of fraudsters who want to get your Google credentials.
- Therefore, always pay attention to the attachment in an email. If it is not an attached file, but an inserted image that gives the appearance of an attachment, do not touch it.
- You should be especially taken aback when you click on an apparent attachment and you are then forwarded to an external page. There are guaranteed fraudsters at work here.
In further practical tips, we will show you how to recognize fake Amazon mails or how to distinguish real PayPal mails from fake ones.
Latest videos
Already recognizable by the sender: This alleged Sparkasse email was definitely not sent by your bank.
Other phishing signals: the English-language subject (1), the impersonal title (2) and the special characters in the mail text (3).
The linked website is definitely not part of the Sparkasse.
