Phishing season is now open

It seems that there are a large number of Phishing emails going around. I had five on the 21st and so far today (23rd) I have had six. Most of them were obviously bogus as I don't have an EBay, Paypal or SKY bank account. The others I did have an account with.

if you get one that looks to be from MSN go to http://safety.msn.com/phishing/ for more information.

I have a number of addresses you can use to report phishing attempts.

• Antiphishing.org - reportphishing@antiphishing.org
• EBAY.com - spoof@ebay.com
• MSN.COM - abuse@msn.com
• Paypal.com - spoof@paypal.com
• phonebusters.com - wafl@phonebusters.com

You can always delete the messages without trying the above, but, the traffic will probably not decrease.

What are the warning signs ->

1. Requests for personal information. Most of the messages are asking you to rekey in personal information.
2. Alarmist. They will try to panic you into replying so that you don't lose your account.
3. Spelling & Grammar. Many times there are obvious spelling and grammatical errors. Unfortunately the scammers are learning.
4. Mis-spelled sites. Small changes in site names. Example yah00 instead of yahoo. See if you can easily see the differences in the two names.
   
5. The link says one thing but when you move the mouse over the link the site name does not match or is a series of numbers (ie. yahoo.com vs 127.0.0.1).
   
6. If it sounds too good to be true. Trust your feelings, paranoia is a good thing today.

If you have doubts about the message open your web browser and go to the site yourself, don't use the link provided.