A phishing (pronounced fishing) website is a website or other online disguise-scam run by cyber criminals who attempt to steal people’s valuable log-in credentials, credit card information, etc.
A phishing website copies a known website such as Facebook or PayPal and try to trick users into entering their username and password. Once the victim falls for the trick, the hackers copy the username and password or other information such as credit card info. And you’re hacked!
It can be difficult for the average web user to suspect or detect a phishing attempt. However, for an internet veteran like myself…I know!
With this article, I hope to save a lot of innocent people from being hacked.
On the 21st of December, 2019, I received an email in my Yahoo Mailbox. This obvious spam-scam email managed to miraculously bypass Yahoo’s Security features and land directly in my inbox, not the bulk mail folder.
It read as follows:
As you can see from the above photo, the email is genuinely designed as though it were coming from PayPal! And this could trick a lot of people into giving out their PayPal information!
But let’s take a closer look! When I click the button near to the sender’s email, look what comes up!
As you can see from the circled email address above, the sender’s email has nothing to do with PayPal or PayPal.com!
Now do you see the “confirm your identity” link in blue? That takes you one step closer to the land mine! When I click it, here is what loads.
That’s a website that looks just like PayPal! And it could trick you into entering your PayPal’s email and password. When you do that, they got it!
Let’s take a closer look at this phishing scam.
As you can see, the domain is “spacepiratefilms.com” and not “paypal.com”!
There some other clues that could help you spot a phishing scam, such as bad grammar and punctuation as is evident in the email screenshot above.
Please share this article to save someone from being scammed and to help raise awareness of phishing sites and cyber theft.
