How to Know Phishing Emails from Regular Mail?

Although email services like Hotmail have amazing ways to keep hackers away, the danger is not completely eliminated. Hackers have a number of ways to steal email accounts of the users. One of those is the phishing scheme. Unfortunately, there is no efficient way to prevent hackers from sending phishing emails. The only solution is to learn how to differentiate them from genuine emails.

The best way to learn how to spot phishing scams is to understand how they work. Basically, the hackers send emails containing links or attachments. The message is urging you to open them. Once you click on the link/attachment, a new window will open, asking you to enter your email account details once again. However, the new page will just look genuine, but you will be entering your password into hackers’ website.

In order to recognize what’s going on, first you need to check what’s written in the email and who’s sending it. If the email is offering you a chance to win money just by clicking on a suspicious link, it is a sign that something fishy is going on. The same goes if the email was sent from a suspicious email address. Usually, the hackers will stay away from using accounts of most popular email services, like Hotmail for example. Instead, they will use some that you’ve probably never heard of.

Finally, if you happen to click on the link in the phishing email, you also need to check if the page that it opened is genuine. To check, you should look at the URL of the website. Most genuine websites will have “HTTPS” written at the beginning of the URL, so if that’s not the case, you need to close that page.

If you have entered your email account details into the suspicious page, you will need to notify the tech support about it. The users of Microsoft’s email service are advised to call Hotmail customer helpline straight away. If you live in Australia, you can get in touch with the people from hotmail.supportaustralia.com.au. This website has a special Hotmail support helpline number 1-800-875-274, which you can call for these kinds of issues.

Source: https://www.kiwibox.com/techsupportau/blog/entry/139995777/how-to-know-phishing-emails-from-regular-mail