The other day Paypal thanked me for buying a Samsung French Door Refrigerator. I can’t wait for it to be delivered! I hope it fits my space. What do I do with my Thanksgiving leftovers while it comes to the right temperature? Will they take the old one away? And Paypal is so helpful. They said if I have issue with the puchase, kindly click here.

We're getting those emails...DAILY! spammers don't have holiday time off

We're still getting mail and phone calls asking to buy our houses....in this slowing economy?! I just installed a phone blocker. It has 10K numbers preprogrammed to block spammer calls.....husband is turning 65 and the Medicare calls alone were 4 a day from just one provider!!!!!!

AT&T sent me an email saying I needed to change the outdated format for my email. Funny that it came from someone named Kenny with a gmail account. (Always look at the sender's address!)

Come on, Chisue, everyone knows Kenny from the security desk, he’s just looking out for you. 😆

"Always look at the sender's address" is not a foolproof method to detect phishing as the address can be spoofed to look like it's from the company or org. https://www.cmu.edu/iso/news/2020/email-spoofing.html

Never click on a link in an email. https://www.komando.com/safety-security-reviews/questions-to-avoid-phishing/349664/%3famp

If in doubt, call them using an internet sourced phone number, not the one in the email. However 'Links you find for yourself are going to be safer, but you still need to be cautious. A Google search is a good example. Hackers use a tactic called “search engine poisoning” to get malicious links to the top of a Google search for popular words and topics.'

Things I live by:

1) The more panicked an email makes me, the more likely it is to be phishing

2) If I'm concerned, I contact the business (Amazon, Paypal, whatever) THROUGH THEIR WEBSITE and not by clicking a link.

Also, Microsoft doesn't care about you. Not so applicable to seasonal shopping-related phishing, but helpful with other types of fraud.

Not a phishing scam but credit card fraud. I received a text from my credit card company on Wednesday alerting me that they'd declined a $124.77 purchase at BevMo and asked me to txt back "Yes" or "No" if I'd attempted that purchase.

I replied "No".

They said they were temporarily suspending my card and asked me to review other recent charges to see if any were unauthorized. There was one, a $226.55 purchase at Target.

So, they closed that card and will be sending me another.

Tis the season.

My youngest is taking a class called Ethical Hacking, which I love to sit in on. It is amazing how easy it can be to establish a backdoor; never click on those links!

Never click to verify that a purchase is or is not yours before checking with your bank. Yours might have a message area or when you open the first screen a message asking about charges will show. I have received messages similar to the one from my bank when my debit card number was hacked and used all across the country. When I checked there was no message on my bank account.

Something I noticed a couple of months ago if I use the "block senders" above the list of emails the full email address will show. If the address is not for the business or person I send it to spam. However I just finished paying of my car and received a couple of emails from third party's that I did not recognize. They were really strange as it was the first time I had to go to a Microsoft site, sign in, to see the message.

Several months ago I got an email from my credit card company about a purchase they questioned. I did not click the link, but I did phone, and yes, indeed, there was a purchase that I had not made. They sent a new card to me priority and it arrived in two days.

But I wasn't going to click that link.

I well know all the warnings and Ithankfully I have not fallen for any of the scammers but honestly some of them are so good that yes I do do a doulble take and feel my heart racing. I love the bad grammar.

At least they told you it was a fridge to expect, @bpath! I just get the messages that my card was used to make a purchase of x amount of money.

I did get one from the A site that did have me worried. ( did log in separately to my account just to see if anything was looking off and thankfully all was right on my prime account.

But yes they are getting really sophisticated.

DS's boss had $2300 mysteriously removed from his business account last Thursday, using a CC, with no matching sale. The bank said the scammers are using random # generators. Great.

With random generated numbers it makes it more important than ever to watch your bank and credit accounts more frequently than once a month.