Don’t Get Hooked by a ‘Phishing’ Scam Recently, many Americans have been receiving fraudulent e-mails, which direct recipients to Web sites where they are asked to verify personal information. The e-mails claim that the individual’s personal information is necessary to assist in updating or validating their billing or contact information. The fraudulent e-mails are part of a scam known as "phishing," "brand spoofing," or "carding."

Phishing (fishing for information) is the fraudulent scheme of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be a legitimate company. The e-mail attempts to persuade the user into surrendering private information such as credit card numbers, bank account information, Social Security numbers, date of birth and passwords that could later be used for identify theft. The e-mail directs the user to a "look-alike" Web site of a legitimate business, tricking the user into thinking he is responding to a bona fide request. The Web sites are so cleverly designed that they are sometimes impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

The most important thing to remember is that any legitimate company will not e-mail or call you out of the blue to ask for any personal information. If you have not initiated the conversation with the company, you should not respond.

‘Pharming’ Information
Pharming is a form of domain spoofing. In simple terms, rather than spamming you with e-mail requests to confirm your financial or personal information, pharmers work behind the scenes. They change your local internet provider server to redirect your Web request to a fake site. This means that when you enter a web address, such as www.abc.com; you will be taken to a fake website rather than the legitimate website!

As far as you know, you're connected to the correct site. No e-mail is involved, and if they copied the appearance of the real site well, you would have no way to know that anything was wrong.