Staying safe online!

Okay so should be reivising but I just wanted to give you some tips to stay wise on the net!

As many of you are aware fraudsters are everywhere!

Many of them will send you emails or even phone calls pretending to be a company or bank that you trust. These guys are clever in how they trick you out of money or details, HOWEVER there are faults in their methods! And I almost fell for one the other day pretending to be Amazon (as I have put a couple of things on their to sell as their not wanted no more), their very clever in how they do it too, a 'customer' contacted me via Amazon asking me to send pictures to show its condition, therefore I did so thinking it was a genuinely interested customer. Not did I know that they was only asking to get hold of my email address to send me emails from the 'customer' to say their happy with the condition and are going to purchase, followed by another email from Amazon (fake one) sending me what looks similar to the notification that I would receive when someone purchases a product from me on Amazon. Although, like I said their were faults to the email.. different layout, extra text, grammar not quite correct and email addresses for me to contact that were not @amazon.co.uk. Long story short I checked up on the email address domain (the bit after @) and it turns out its used frequently by fake companies!

So here are my tips for spotting a fraudsters email:

• they will ask you for details such as address, bank details, credit cards, passwords etc (real companies will never ask you this in an email!
• if they contain email addresses outside of their usual email address domain (e.g. if they usually send emails from @amazon.co.uk but state email addresses @consultant.com, don't trust them and certainly don't send them anything, check with company first (email amazon directly before sending anything to that address)
• read through all the text, if it doesn't sound right in some places its usually because they've used an online translator or have not read through the text)
• if it is an email from Amazon or EBay about an order check in your account online if it's not there then there's no real order

If you get a call from your bank to confirm details and are suspicious don't say any of your details, tell them if it's important to do it you'll go into your local branch, if it really is your bank they can't argue there!

Stay Safe!!