How to Protect Yourself Against Internet Phishing Scams

Have you ever given out an account number, password, or other private information in response to an email and found, too late, that you were scammed? Crooks called phishers count on your not knowing how to tell the difference between a legitimate email and a fake.

You get an email that looks as if it's from your bank, or Paypal, or maybe your credit card company, asking you to update your information, sometimes with the warning that your account is in danger of being cancelled. The email includes a link for you to click on, but instead of taking you to the real site, you land at a realistic copy. You fill in the requested information, and before long you find that your bank account has been cleaned out or that your credit card has been used to run up thousands of dollars in purchases.

PhishTank, an internet clearing house for information about phishing, reports that out of more than 12,000 suspicious emails submitted to them in 2001, almost 9,000 were scams. In the last two years, U.S. consumers lost $7 billion to email scams, and one out of every four households that has regular internet users has been a victim.

How can you tell whether an email is real or a clever phishing scam? If you don't know how to tell the difference, Anti-Phishing Phil can be your best friend and teacher. "Anti-Phishing Phil is an interactive game that teaches users how to identify phishing URLs, where to look for cues in web browsers, and how to use search engines to find legitimate sites." It was invented by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists who found that a game is a better teaching method than tutorials or articles. An early study showed that people increased their ability to identify scam sites by 20 percent-from 67 percent accuracy before playing with Phil, to 87 percent afterwards.