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Sheriff’s Office Concerned on Mounting Phishing Scams

The Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office is issuing alert to the general public regarding the prevalence and severity of phishing e-mail scams.

However Internet and e-mail have become an important part of human lives, but the increasing volume of fraud and scams related to Internet/e-mails is also a truth. One of such popular scam is "phishing", which has grown so sophisticated with time that it has become extremely difficult to detect it.

The phishing e-mails are designed in such a way that they appear to be coming from a reliable website that the user has visited earlier, such as a social networking site or the user's bank. Most of them even bear logos resembling to those on the legitimate sites.

The scammers could even enrich the fake e-mail by including the user's personal details that they have harvested online. Many of these mails will ask the user either to verify his account details or to claim some prize that he might have won for a competition he never really participated in.

At least 30,000 e-mail addresses harvested via phishing e-mails were published on the Internet in the first week of October 2009.

In one of the recent scams, the phishing e-mails also hunt for the information required to get the user's password in case he changes it. Taking this incident as a model of what ways the phishers are adopting to phish off the innocent netizens, the warning issued by the Sheriff's Office to remain cautious should be taken seriously.

One of the most common and easiest ways to detect phishing e-mails is the use of bad English in the mail. These e-mails are full of grammatical errors like wrong use of capital letters. As these scams are not known to originate in English speaking countries, the English used in the text is often poor.

Moreover, an even simpler way to confirm the phishing nature of an e-mail is that a legitimate company/institution never asks to confirm any of the personal details of the user via e-mail.

Giving his comments on the issue, Larry Deen, Bossier Sheriff, stated that both white collar crimes as well as Internet scams are becoming increasingly prevalent day-by-day, reported nwlanews.com on October 12, 2009.

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