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• Fake email addresses - Malicious actors sometimes send from email addresses made to look like an official email address but in fact is missing a letter(s), misspelled, replaces a letter with a lookalike number (e.g. “O” and “0”), or originates from free email services that would not be used for official communications.
Phishing scams happen when you receive an email that looks like it came from a company you trust (like AOL), but is ultimately from a hacker trying to get your information. All legitimate AOL Mail will be marked as either Certified Mail, if its an official marketing email, or Official Mail, if it's an important account email. If you get an ...
Scams and confidence tricks are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and the intended victim is the "mark".
Email fraud (or email scam) is intentional deception for either personal gain or to damage another individual using email as the vehicle. Almost as soon as email became widely used, it began to be used as a means to de fraud people, just as telephony and paper mail were used by previous generations.
Email scams posing as the Internal Revenue Service were also used to steal sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. [64] Social networking sites are a prime target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft ; [ 65 ] In 2007, 3.6 million adults lost US$3.2 billion due to phishing attacks. [ 66 ]
The “boss scam’ has been reported in other parts of the county in recent years. Some have come by email and others by text messages, according to a Reddit post that shared nearly the same wording.
Currently it is unclear how far back the origin of scam letters date. The oldest reference to the origin of scam letters could be found at the Spanish Prisoner scam. [1] This scam dates back to the 1580s, where the fictitious prisoner would promise to share non-existent treasure with the person who would send him money to bribe the guards.
Another type of lottery scam is a scam email or web page where the recipient had won a sum of money in the lottery. The recipient is instructed to contact an agent very quickly but the scammers are just using a third party company, person, email or names to hide their true identity, in some cases offering extra prizes (such as a 7 Day/6 Night Bahamas Cruise Vacation, if the user rings within 4 ...