Teresa please please don' answer those emails

They are fraudulently 'phishing' for info, those aren't your banks!

Go to your institutions websites, find their 'fraud' departments, and Forward those emails to them

no one will ever ask for your pesonal info to be re-entered

google 'phishing' and learn

I would never so much as click on the link in one of those unsolicited emails. I'd open a new browser session, type in the URL that I use for that company, access my account and see if there are any messsages.

Same goes for phone calls. If my bank calls me to verify charges or something and they're the ones supplying the recent charges for me to say yes and no to, I'm fine with it. But if someone calls and says they're from my bank and then starts asking questions "to verify my identity" I politely explain that I have no way of knowing they're legit and that I will call back their customer service number to see what's going on. Oh and I also don't trust the caller ID to tell me who they are.

Teresa, these are not from your bank or from Yahoo. Do NOT click on any link in these emails. Delete them.

Yahoo or any bank will never ask you to do this.

I do get legitimate emails from my banks but they are always some promotional stuff or newsletter. Even then, I check any link before I click.

The way to check a link is to hover your mouse over the link (without clicking) - the real address the link is going to will appear in the very bottom strip of your browser. Beware that if you have an older browser, some clever phishers figured out how to fake that too. But latest browsers will show the correct link.

So, if you hover over a link in an email that looks like it is coming from Bank of America - the link should have "bankofamerica.com" as the home address. It may have something preceding it, like "email.bankofamerica.com" - that's okay too.

But if it says "bankofamerica.someotherwebsite.com" or "someotherwebsite.com/bankofamerica"; that's not bankofamerica.com.

When in doubt, even if you get legit email from your bank but you are not sure - do not click on anything, just delete it and call your bank.

One final note - don't flag these as spams because then your legit emails may not come through anymore.

You might need a better spam filter on your email. I used to get those and deleted them without opening them. One reason was that I had never given my email address to my bank. I got emails from banks where I didn't have an account also. You should be just as suspicious of these as you should from unsolicited phone calls. Caller ID has helped cut down on phone scams, however - at least for me. I'm very suspicious of everyone, but that does not stop me from answering the phone from a number I do not recognize. Last week I got a call from Steve at Cal State Northridge, and he said he was calling me because I had attended their Pow Wow the week-end before. I didn't remember going there, and so I said, "I did?" I hadn't gone, but I did buy a raffle ticket from someone who entered it for me, and I had won a prize. The prize was a really strange T-shirt, which I received a few days ago.

Lars

Ignore all such emails. Never ever reply in any way shape or form. If you hit "unsubscribe", you've just given a scammer/spammer a reason to sell you email address.

Granted, if you ever buy something online from a business, they'll contact you. I did just unsubscribe from See's Candy and Lenox China, both of which I had ordered from this year.

Just like junk phone calls. I hang up the minute I get either nothing after my "Hello?" (it's a phone bank) or someone I don't know who is obviously not calling me personally (usually they botch the name pronunciation), or ask for my husband by his given name or a title (always his alma mater asking for money). And I don't get into a discussion with them or even say a word. I just hang up. Period. just hang up.

Here's the thing, if it's a real call, say from the dentist's office reminding me of my upcoming office, or Aunt Mabel, and I hang up by mistake, the person will call back. Never fails. They call back.

Same goes for emails. Delete. If it's legitimate business, they will try to contact you again. So delete delete delete. No legit businesses operate that way at all.

I like Lars' story about his t-shirt prize... you can tell when calls are legit, even if they seem strange!

I do appreciate your responses. Yes, I do delete - but I still have this nagging feeling, especially if it appears to be from my bank. I did get a legit email from Wells Fargo the other day about my "bonus points." And I've found that Yahoo has not canceled my email account after repeated threats to do so if I don't supply the info they want. But Yahoo could help stop this phishing if they would make it easier to report it.

Long ago I learned about phone banks and I give the caller less than 3 seconds to reply then I hang up. But I've cut those calls down to almost 0% by having only a cell phone and no land line. Still trying to get my mother to develop this habit of hanging up.

Thanks for helping me to feel less stressful about these emails.

Teresa

If major corporations with big tech department cannot prevent their systems from being hacked, what chances do you have to prevent problems?

I have more than one computer system that I use. One system with all my important information, financial stuff that I keep for limited use. I don't use that one to surf the WEB. You never know what can get inside your computer, doesn�t matter what anti-virus, anti Trojan software you have.

dcarch

If you wish to read the emails from the "bank" then do so, but do not click on any attachment or on any link within the email. This option works only if you have security that blocks identification of your computer and have a strong anti-virus program that scans all incoming messages for threats.

If it appears that the bank is forwarding an important message regarding your account or other pertinent information, follow the advice already given. Never, ever respond via email. The safest option is to call your bank and inquire regarding the message. The second safest is to access your bank directly via a webpage. But (and I know I'm repeating) do not respond to the email or provide any personal information whatsoever.

Be aware that an email can link you to a very sophisticated "spoof" of a legitimate website. These fraudulent sites can be difficult to detect.

I would also add that I have received phone calls which claimed to be from my bank and weren't, so my rule of thumb is I never provide information that is requested without initiating contact myself.

That is the best and most trustworthy advice I can give. All information should be provided after you have initiated contact.

Carol

Here is a link that might be useful: Fraudwatch International Phishing Methods

Teresa, I get them all the time and I bank with a small, local bank. I get emails purporting to be from Wells Fargo, from Bank of America, from CitiBank, and I've never done business with any of them, so they are clearly fraudulent. I also get emails from PayPal.

Delete them all, your bank will not ask for any kind of verification on line, ever, because of this kind of thing. If you wonder about it being real, go to your bank's website independently, do NOT click the link, and check to see if there are any messages for you within the bank's electronic system.

Annie

Sorry, my bank never asks me for personal information in an e-mail. They don't send me friendly reminders either. In fact, you don't bank via e-mail. You can bank via a bank's secure Web site, but banks don't carry on transactions via e-mail. Period. Neither do credit cards. They can send you a friendly reminder to pay your bill, but all transactions will be done via a Web site, not e-mail. Banks know that e-mail is not secure. So feel free to ignore anything asking you for personal information from a bank. It is just NOT done via e-mail. It is done thru secure Web sites with passwords and usernames. And banks will not ask you for those either. They can SEND you a new password or username, but they cannot and will not ask you for your password via e-mail. Not legitimate organizations.

Got this one off one of my favorite blogs. I was surfing cafepress last week, looking for notecards. In my other window, one tab over, I had another website open with banner ads, no relation to cafepress. My 'cart' contents and an ad for cafepress were on the other window's ads. Talk about sharing info. There ain't no such thing as internet privacy, especially on GW, where IP addies are easily available! Oh and facebook? Don't get me started. You may think you have privacy with a fake name, but they are collecting info about you through all your interactions with others who have your email! grrrr...

"I've been nagging you and nagging you some more about the Internet and how it isn't the safest place in the universe if you value your privacy. Many of you insist on putting private thoughts and experiences on MySpace and Facebook and then are horrified when there is some negative blowback in your lives, like from a boss or friend or family member reading some stuff you wish they hadn't.

Well, it gets worse. Dozens of websites have been secretly harvesting lists of places their users previously visited online. That includes everything from news articles to bank sites to pornography.

The information, according to the Associated Press, is valuable for con artists to learn more about their targets and send them personalized attacks. It also allows e-commerce companies to adjust ads or prices, for instance, if the site knows you've just come from a competitor who is offering a lower price.

This technique is called "history sniffing," and is a result of the way browsers interact with websites and record where they've been. It only takes a few lines of programming code to pull it off.

Current versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers still allow this, as do older versions of Chrome and Safari.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego found 46 sites, ranging from smutty to staid, that tried to pry loose their visitors browsing histories using this technique. Nearly half of the 46 sites, including financial research site Morningstar.com and news site Newsmax.com used an ad-targeting company Interclick which says its code was responsible for the tracking.

Again, according to the Associated Press, the source for this whole announcement, Morningstar, said it ended its relationship with Interclick when it found out about the program and Newsmax said it didn't know history sniffing had been used on its users until the AP called.

Internet companies are obsessed with tracking users' behavior so they can target their ads better. The Federal Trade Commission is proposing rules that would limit an advertiser's ability to track Internet users to show them advertisements.

History sniffing is essentially a side-by-side comparison of Web pages you've already visited with Web pages that a particular site wants to see if you've visited. If there is a match, users would never know but the site administrators would learn a lot about you.

For instance, according to AP, a popular porn site was checking its visitors' history to see if they'd visited 23 other pornography sites, and the code used on the Morningstar and Newsmax.com sites looked for matches against 48 specific Web pages, all related to Ford automobiles.

Sites can carry on this kind of inspection at the rate of 20,000 Internet addresses per second.

Remember all this when you next sign on to the Net."

As phishers/spammers/hackers get more sophisticated the emails start looking more legit. It's ease to spot when the grammar is poor and the sytax is obviously written by a person who's first languange is not english.
I bill my client's for pet services on their credit/debit cards and this year there is a new security policy in place. When I ran the scan on this computer which I use for emails and surfing the web I recieved 76 different security violations for various severity levels. I had to purchase another computer just for billing credit cards. Hooked up to the same DLS/Router box the new 'fresh' computer (this computer I am typing on is less than a year old) received ZERO violations. I was a little upset having to buy yet another new computer this years...but I guess I can understand that thinking. Dcarch apparently has the same thought process/idea but he did it on his own. Not a bad idea if you mix pleasure (web surfing, forums, email, etc.) with personal (banking).

And if you play on Facebook DO NOT click on any links..period! Got my hard drive zapped last year about this time.

Duane