Windows Live account Phishing scam.

Not a day goes by that my junk folder in my hotmail or gmail account contains some kind of phishing attempt or internet scams. There is always unscrupulous people out there who tries to pry your personal information or try to make you believe they are some African country's ambassador looking for someone to help them channel their money.

Although I do feel a bit insulted when receiving this kind of email, there are always the greater fools out there who will fall for their traps and submit to their scams. And these scams unlike your everyday computer viruses, do not just invade Windows machines. They are OS independent! Here is one of the emails I received yesterday in my hotmail account and it goes to show how easy it is that someone will fall for it.

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They will always use some creative titles to capture your attention and I'm sure someone would have fallen for it easily. I have an article written previously, "Hotmail account Hijacked or hacked? Here's how I retrieved it..." that saw me trying to retrieve my wife's hotmail account that was hijacked. Fortunately, we got back the account. These are probably one of the ways she could have compromised her account details.

Nonetheless, here are some advice for you to avoid internet scams:

1. Do not use same usernames or password as your email to sites that require a username and password for registration.
2. Do not login to requests from friends' IMs that has messages like "Hey, look at the pictures I took of us in the theme park". They usually tell you that you need to login using your hotmail/gmail/yahoo mail accounts.
3. Do not reply to emails asking you for username and password details. NO BANKS OR ANY LEGITIMATE ONLINE SERVICES IN THE WORLD WILL EVER ASK YOU FOR USERNAME AND PASSWORDS VIA EMAIL.
4. Check the URL of any sites that require you to login before you login. For example, Microsoft's services will have http://www.live.com/ in the URL and not something like http://live.apt-live.com/.
5. Do not give your password to anyone over the phone who is asking for the information so that they can help you. Again, no legitimate online services will ever ask you for that over the phone.
6. Don't be greedy and fall for any email offers that come from unknown sources.

And in case you are wondering, I did reply to the above email. Of course I did! How could I now reply just to keep my account from being shut down by Microsoft?! :)

Related articles

• What is Phishing? (Fishing) (socyberty.com)
• Online Fraud Types (brighthub.com)