Avoiding Phishing Texts

Phishing is a social engineering process by which swindler and frauds extract personal information through widespread applications like emails, cellular texts and the like. The details that are attempted to be retrieved by these cheats are extremely private and sensitive. Cyber crime comprises largely of Phishing messages, pictures and emails. Phishing is mostly targeted at the online payment services and customers of various banks. Presently the social networking sites are also frequently attacked by them.

Phishing Process

The process of phishing is an elaborate one. Phishing can be initiated by a phishing text. This is a kind of text message or SMS sent in the name of the authorized organization or institution. These texts can be sent to an individual or a particular company by the fraudulent individual. The text message is composed in a way to allure the recipient to click on the provided link. This URL generally belongs to an unknown site. The mail is designed in an extremely professional way and the most of the recipients are hardly able to figure out the phishing process.

For instance, you may get a phishing text from a bank where you hold an account. The message will say that there were some transactions made by your credit card and you can stop the further transactions by hitting a particular link. This will naturally tempt you to click on the given URL as you would be sure that no transaction had been made as such. This will result is giving out the personal details unknowingly. These scam texts are also received via emails. The technical deception level of these fraudulent sources is so advanced that it is tough to make out the phishing activity.

Risks

These fraud emails and SMS are sent from fake websites, phone numbers and email IDs. Therefore these have no link with the bank or the organization that has been referred to in the message. As soon as you enter a few of your personal details, the information get stored in the database operated by these scammers. When they are successful in retrieving your private data, they simply abandon their contact links. Before you realize much, your account will be hampered or interrupted by these fraudsters. Your credit card maybe used for making online purchases without your knowledge.
 

The details that are mostly obtained are:

• Username
• Password
• Account number
• Credit card details

The personal information is often sold off to other institutions who actually hire the professional frauds. Your private data is then used for identity thefts as well as other types of related crimes. Ultimately all your private details related to an account are hacked and is at high risk.

Identification of Phishing Texts

If observed carefully you can discover a phishing intention. The URLs provided in the text often have misspelled words and subdomains. These tricks are quite common in these types of applications. Another way by which you can identify a phishing text is “anchor texts”. These are made for a certain link which seems to be legitimate and valid. As soon as you click on the link you end up in the fraud site. There are many internationalized domain names which aggravates the phishing issue further. Many a time the URL redirectors are used so that the scam address can be disguised by the trusted domain.