The unfortunate part of using technology is having individuals out there that want to do bad things.  These types of “hacks” are becoming more and more prevalent as technology continues to improve.   One of the more prevalent issues that we see is Phishing scams, pronounced as fishing.  This is where someone is trying to seek out your personal information for a variety of reasons.  The typical methods in which they use is email.  Sometimes they are able to get into someone’s email account and turn it into a bot account sending millions of emails in a short amount of time  to not only their address book, but the company address book on top of their already known address book.

We see so many of these different scams it is crazy, they can appear to be just a simple text message asking your for a phone number so they can contact you, to elaborate “forgot/reset password” to systems you didn’t request, but they appear that they are actually from the company when in all reality they are not.

Things to look out for is the email address in which the email come from.  If isn’t simply the domain that the service is on, it probably isn’t good.  There are a bunch of other flags to look out for.  The best method is to hover over any links it should come up with a pop up, showing you where that link will take you.  If this link is taking you to a super long URL, that doesn’t start with service it is referring to, it is not good.  When you suspect the email isn’t good, don’t even respond to the email or click on any links.  Some of them may be scary as they are threatening with account suspensions and that kind of thing, however it is best to ignore these.

If you want to verify anything they claim in the email, go to the website directly where this service is at, please do not click on the link in the email.  Once you login after manually getting to the website, if there is any issues, there is typically a banner at the top or a notification indicating any issues with the account.

One of the more sneakier ones that we have come across most recently is a phishing scam that is asking for users cell phone numbers.  Which when they do this, it appears to be sent from a known person, however the email in which they are sending the email from is not a normal email that the user has used in the past.  Victims of this scam give out their cell phone numbers willingly, which results in the hacker texting them asking them for gift cards to iTunes/Apple Music or something similar.  The bad part about this scam, is that once they have your number, they don’t loose it.  They may go silent for a time then out of the blue here they come again impersonating someone you may know again.