Howard's Day

Like most people I meet, I seem to be inundated with a variety of different emails from people whose intentions are not exactly honourable. Whether it be the online provision of certain medication or just completely irrelevant and unsuitable material, I sometimes wonder whether our firewalls and anti-spam filters are letting through more spam than genuine mail. Perhaps it’s just that these people are cleverer or as one person in the US told me, the proportion of spam to genuine mail is something in the region of 9:1.

Perhaps one of the most insidious areas of such emailing is the practice of Phishing. This is where emailers, pretending to be some other organisation, try and get information about you so as to carry out some other crime. The one that many of us will have come across is the email purported to be from a particular bank. Often this is by way of a “security alert” and asks you to reset your password or provide certain other information.

A more worrying and plausible email I received recently was purportedly from the Inland Revenue! This suggested I was due a tax refund and asked me to enter my bank details so the payment could be made directly to my bank account. On the face of it, the email was quite convincing until one click through to the website and I saw none of the links on the page were clickable and the telephone number was non-existent.

Nevertheless many unsuspecting people will I am sure provide their bank details.

Of course, for the people doing the “phishing”, this is purely a numbers game. They send out so many emails, (remember many of us have more than one email account), in the knowledge that a percentage, albeit a small one, will be duped.

Many of us have become more web-savvy over the last few years so that we recognise these emails when they arrive and in many cases, report them to the banks and even the police. However there is a growing band of new adoptees, particularly of the silver surfing community, who may not be aware of all the scams that exist online.

Whilst many of these emails are not particularly sophisticated, they will still catch a fair number of people. For more details on the dangers of phishing, or should you wish to report any electronic crime, visit www.antiphishing.org.