Potential Identity Theft: Spotting E-mail Scams

Stealing people’s identities via e-mail is one sure way that crooks get people. It starts with the seemingly innocent spam mail that looks just like the “real” e-mail newsletters you requested.

It also may even involved references to websites that you use all the times, such as PayPal or your credit card account. Another big one of course is the ever-growing “Nigerian” letter scam that promises you large sums of money if you comply with the writer’s wishes.

Often that type of scam is some sort of sob story about an ill loved one. It might even be about someone that was close to them and died. They might even try to sucker God-believing people in by saying things like “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Other types of e-mail scams involve dating website e-mail connections. This is in fact an ever-growing big one! A man may pose as a woman or vice-versa and try to get some kind of personal information from you.

That is in fact one of the ways most types of e-mail scams work-to convince you to reveal some sort of personally and/or financially identifiable information. This stolen info is then used to get money out of you somehow.

The way they do it is they somehow con you into revealing information you should not otherwise reveal. It could be a website password, a credit card number or bank account number. In any case, the info you give is not for any good benefit to you.

It is all done in a way so that the crook can rob you and steal all of your money if they find a way. By the way, you could even get caught up in so-called foreign “bank account” scams that are not even run by real banks, or it could be a fraudulent gambling outfit.

It could even be an erectile dysfunction ad scam sent to you with an “Order Viagra Now” link in it. If you click on this link it may send you to a payment page. However, the site you go to may be the imposter of a legitimate website.

By and large though, the largest scams are probably those connected to shopping carts and payment transaction sites such as PayPal. Sometimes you might get an e-mail that may appear at first glance to be from PayPal but it is not.

More information will be presented to teach you how to prevent being scammed. This article is just an introduction to make you aware of potential e-mail scams.