What Are Phishing Scams?

[Roxy]

Phishing scams involve a scam email falsely being sent to mimic an actual company or email provider. In most cases either a bank, credit card company, webmail provider (impersonating sites like Gmail, Yahoo, etc), social media platforms (sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc), or certain forms of online digital service companies (like eBay, PayPal, Amazon, etc). In other cases the phishing scam might mimic a real bank or credit card company. Often the scammers use logos and other graphics taken from these real companies in order to make their fraudulent phishing emails appear more convincing.

These scams are intended to trick the intended victim into providing their real account login information details to scammer. It is done so via a link that is provided by the scammer and where one's personal information is requested to be entered into a fraudulent site that records the information in order for the scammer to then be able to access the person's online accounts and possibly steal money and/or personal information.

The scam mails usually contain a malicious web link where the intended victim is tricked into clicking on the link in order to update their account details and they are told by the phishing email that doing this is for their own security reasons.

Links in emails from unknown senders should never be clicked on anyway as they may install a key-logger or other forms of trojans or other types of malicious malware onto one's computer.

In addition, most of the above mentioned companies would never send you any such emails to begin with. So if you receive emails asking you to login to any of your accounts in order to update or reset any of your information then in almost all cases it is part of a phishing scam.