December 9, 2004

How to spot an online scam?

If you get an email that says click on this link "eBay.com" to verify your email address, how do you know the link really points to eBay.

ZDNet's Brian Cooley advises There's a simple way to spot these scams. Just hover your mouse over the link in the e-mail. After a second or two, your browser or e-mail software will pop up a little balloon that will show you the real link you'd be clicking. It will be patently bogus. For example, the link in a recent PayPal phish that I received looked like this in the actual body of the e-mail:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

But hovering over it, the actual URL was revealed to be
http://www.paypal-customers.net/

I highly suggest you read his full column.

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