How to identify scam and hoax emails..

If you use email communication, chances are you are receiving junk email. Most junk emails doesn't take much effort to identify. A word like Viagra in the subject line is enough to send it to the trash bin. And the sender's name or email address is another give-away. Unknown senders or email addresses usually spell junk mail.

Although scam mail and hoax mail are also junk mail, they take a little extra effort to determine if they are indeed junk. This is because quite often they could be from a legitimate sender, someone whom you are familiar with. Let start with hoax mail..

Hoaxes

An otherwise harmless email that is designed to cause alarm or get itself forwarded to other users (or both). The nature of a hoax email is usually one or a combination of the followings:

• a warning of some kind (false in nature)
• urging you to forward the email on to others, hence becoming a chain email.
• can be any of these categories: virus hoaxes, giveaways hoaxes, charity hoaxes, hoax petitions, etc

Most of the time, the goal of hoax emails is to become a chain letter. Although deem harmless, it has its consequence nevertheless. What harm can a chain letter be, you may ask? Well, not directly to the recipient. Indirectly it affects everyone. Just imagine if each recipient forwards an email on to 10 others. First level would be 10 emails going out. The next level would be a hundred, and then 1000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million. This could easily cause millions of 'harmless' emails traveling around in cyberspace. And it will cause congestion of the network traffic, mail server resources. Although quite transparently to us but with real effects. A high percentage of the emails are junk mail. Some even suggested as high as 95% of emails are junk mail. No one know for sure how much but 90% plus isn't really a far fetch figure.

How do you know if an email is a hoax?

Well, if an email is a warning letter of some sort, urging to be forwarded to others, I would say that 99% of the time it is a hoax. For the remaining 1%, a search on Google/Yahoo search engines would serve to to verify that. There are a number of sites that deals with hoaxes. If you feel you should forward an email, be sure to verify first that it isn't a hoax by visiting some of these sites. I, for one, rarely forward emails. And if I do feel that it is important enough, I always verify it first to be authentic.

Scam mail

Scan mail has only one purpose, to deceive recipients into giving up certain private information or money. This is known as phishing. By far most common these days would be your bank account or credit card information. An example email subject looks like this: ***Important Notice from Bank of America Customer Center***. Now if you do not have a Bank of America account, that is already a give away sign that it is a scam mail. Even if you do have an account with such a bank, if the email tells you to sign in and verify your account, that again is a give-away. Banks will NEVER send you an email to ask you to go log in and verify your account. Using some common sense will help you avoid scams.

One word of caution: scam usually have a link that takes you to a website page that looks every bit genuine, like the bank site that you are so familiar with. If you dig a little deeper, you will see that it is a wolf in a sheep skin. If you are curious enough to click that link, you will find in the address box of the browser a suspicious looking URL. For example, Bank of America will usually have a URL that begins with www.bankofamerica.com/.... And a fake site might have something like http://www.dsbis.com/files/bankofamerica/do.php ( this was an actual url that I received in one of the scam mail). The most important part of a url is the the domain name, the first part of the url. In this example, www.dsbis.com tells me that it isn't bank of america, even though part of the url contains that name. Incidentally the owner of that website isn't the one trying to deceive you but rather someone who has hacked into that website and posted some scam webpages without the knowledge of the website owner.

I personally use the Firefox browser as my primary browser and it has one good feature among the many, and this is the warning Firefox will pops up when you try to visit a website that is a suspected or known forgery site. This is especially helpful for the time when you are off guard. The screen will look like this:

There are too many kinds of scams on the internet to be listed here. For more information on internet scams, check out sites like the FBI or Scam Busters. One thing to remember, scammers usually cash on one human weakness, greed or easy gain. The bottom line is an old wise saying, "if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is".