Most email phishing is seen as the attempt of an individual to gain someone's account numbers or other personal information. This is collected in order to complete a transaction which includes them removing money from your banking accounts or stealing your identity.
Such emails include the ones in which a foreign individual wishes to transfer money into a state side account usually as his method of getting the money safely out of his country. He does this so that he may remove such money at a later date. It was so prevalent at one time for such to be coming from a "Nigerian prince" that it became known as a Nigerian scam.
This type of email phishing includes the giving of account information, having a small amount of money placed into the account, and then a suddenly finding a large amount of your money is withdrawn. It is unfortunate that many people do fall for this simple email phishing technique. It is even more unfortunate and sad that such people were trying to help a fellow human out as well as trying to get something for the very little effort of allowing the use of their banking account.
Other phishing techniques include sending an official looking email from what one is led to believe is the bank of that individual. This email is requesting that one update the personal information of the individual on the website that they have provided a link to. When one hits the link, the website that they have listed is not the website that one goes to, although it often has the same appearance of a bank website. This type of email phishing is of a much higher level of sophistication than other types and can be harder to identify. One should be aware that many, if not all, financial institutions will never request that one updates their personal information via a website.
In addition other email phishing attempts will seem to come from some service provider such as AOL with a link to update your account or notifying you of some problem with your account that needs you to add your credit card information again. Once more this is something where you must be careful. Know that most such companies will not send you a link in an email to do this. There are other ways as well to know if this is a fraudulent email.
One of the most important things that one can do to help prevent email phishing is to report each and every email that one gets that appears suspicious. It is far better to be too safe with one's identity and finances than not safe enough.
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