Well, ‘solved’ is a bit misleading as these sorts of problems are unlikely to ever by truly resolved and while some of it just offensive, some of it is actually dangerous.  Worse, these are getting very hard to spot.  The old rules of looking for poor grammar or other obvious mistakes like malformed graphics apply less and less as spammers get more sophisticated.

However there is still a ready way to detect many of these email frauds and that is by hovering your mouse overtop of the link they want you to click.  This will display the address that link will actually send you to.  In the example to the right, an “RBC” warning message wants me to go to bushlandflora.com.au which is highly unlikely to have anything to do with the real RBC, although I am sure that page LOOKS like a real RBC login page.

The best way to protect yourself from these “phishing scams” is to NOT click any links in emails that are unexpectedly sent to you.  If you are worried about your RBC account because you received an email like the one below, DON’T click their link.  Just start Internet Explorer, type www.rbc.com into the address bar, sign into your accounts and make sure all appears well.  Also if you don’t click their links, the spammers don’t get paid is definitely a good thing.

You can also forward any spam messages to abuse@frontbridge.com which is a Microsoft service that hunts spam.  They will not respond to you or annoy you in any way but they will analyze the message and figure out how to stop others from getting it in the future.

 

how-to-spot-spam-phishing


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