Attempt to Steal Personal Info. Protect Yourself from Identity Theft Scam

Andre, a resident of Beechwood community in Clearwater (Irvine, CA) was alerted by a txt message from Wells Fargo of transfer of $5500 to a third party which “he had done”.   He was shocked since for the past one week, he had not accessed his bank account at all.   So how did this happen? And why does this happen all the while, to so many people around?

Emails / text messages designed to steal personal info is generally known as Phishing. While such attacks mounted using phone is called Vishing.

Everyday, we are bombarded by text and mail messages which come  with variety of subjects and ever new content. Its quite possible that one could lose self restraint and interact with one of those.  The Texts or emails take one to a website which very often is a deftly made copy of an original, well respected website.  Here the  user is asked to login and the rogue website captures the data to login to your original account and create havoc.

In certain cases, the user is enticed with out of the world offers and asked to register and during the process, personal info is stolen. There are many such honey

traps which collect  email addresses  and sells it to spammers for a fee.  Others steal credit card info which are later used by cyber crime networks, to mount large-scale attacks. 

Personal info is also stolen by direct voice calls. The caller may pretend to be a bank employee, a customer care executive or even a lawyer or police officer.  While the first two, sweet talk the user to divulge information, the last ones threaten the user with arrest warrants and jail terms, to soften him/her  and grab vital information.

Steps to Protect Yourself from Attempt to Steal Personal Info

• If an offer is too good to be true, leave it aside!
• Release personal info, only if you are certain for what purpose it would be used
• Never fill in forms at websites which you are not familiar with
• Take time, evaluate the website, check reviews and comments before proceeding
• Beware of phone calls by fraudsters, pretending  to be from legitimate businesses that you know
• Survey Jobs,  Part Time Online Job Offers, Mystery Shopping etc are dominated by scammers. Stay away from them!
  

  Report instances of attempt to steal your personal info at Scamcallfighters.com