I have alerted my customers several times in the past few months to be on guard against fake emails. These fake emails appear to come from your bank, from the IRS, from PayPal, from FedEx, or one of your credit cards.
Generally these emails are telling you that a payment you just made is being processed. Here’s an example of one I received today.
One way to tell if it’s a fake email is to hover your mouse over one of the links. The popup window should display the “real” location of where it will take you if you click on the link.
Two things in the example below:
(1) You would think that an email from Paypal would be taking you to a PayPal.com web site, but not in this case! Take a close look – it’s taking me to a website “air-maxes-shop.com”.
(2) the URL displayed in the box is not even using an https protected address, but an unprotected http site.
So, please be vigilant! The best suggestion I can make is that if you cannot tell if the email is real or fake, then do NOT click on any links within the email. You can always call the company (IRS, FedEx, Bank, etc.) and speak to someone to clarify if this is a real or fake email.
