Last updated on October 17, 2022
Among the e-mails you receive daily in different forms, it is not easy to identify whether it is a genuine or a scam email. The following indicators will help you to recognize fraudulent e-mails.
Incomplete / misspelled words
One way of identifying a scam e-mail is that it consists of poor spelling, grammar, or One way of identifying a scam e-mail is that it consists of poor spelling, grammar, or punctuation. The e-mails you receive from professional organizations rarely contain those mistakes. Normally scam e-mails are drafted by the individuals who may not have very strong skills in spellings or grammar, or may even be written in a rush. Therefore, if you come across an e-mail which pretends to be from a genuine company, but with spelling or grammatical errors, that is most probably a scam and should be deleted.
Requires immediate action
If you receive an email requiring immediate action, it is better to contact the relevant company directly and verify its legitimacy.
Request to enter personal information
Some scam e-mails persuade you to enter your personal information, login credentials or credit card details saying that is to verify an issue with your account or some other reason. Some of them will take you to a fake site too. However, legitimate businesses never ask information via email. Therefore, be very careful.
Addressed to a username
Some fraudulent e-mail writers do not have any of your information other than your username or email address. Therefore, you may be addressed in a more common way like Dear Sir / Ma’am, Hi there, etc… whereas legitimate companies do address their customers most of the time by their full name. Hence, you can determine whether it is a phishing e-mail, if it indicates an attempt of collecting your personal information without even addressing you specifically.
Check the web page link
Clicking the links you are not sure of or you never expected is very dangerous since they may even make damages to your device or data with malware or ransomware. The best way of identifying a scam email is to check the web page link, the scammers have sent you.
There are two simple methods of inspecting a link. The first is to place your mouse cursor on the link, without clicking. Then at the bottom of the program or the browser in the status bar, you will see actual website address of the link. You can check the indicated link address and get it verified with the web address of the genuine company.
The second way is to right-click on the link of the email and select “Copy Link Location” or a similar option given. Then paste it on a TextPad or Microsoft Word, which will show you the real web address of the link the unknown has sent you. Accordingly you can compare that link with the company’s real website address and check if they match or not.
Learn more about how to determine a fake or a fraudulent link through the article of “You Decide whether it is a Fake or a Real Website!”
After inspecting how genuine the link is, if you still feel that it is suspicious, do not click on it. You can even bin it or report spam.