Use The Internet Safely! Anti-virus software, anti-adware, identity theft
prevention, email web site, spoof emails, phishing emails
by Jerry the K.
It
seems everyday my email box is once again full of all sorts of
solicitations to steal my personal identity. They make promises of
$100.00 gift cards if I just complete an online survey. Sometimes it's a
banking institution saying my account has been breached and I need to
confirm some information.
We have all received those emails from some
disposed Prince of an African country wanting us to help them save the
family fortune and offering to share it with us if we would only help.
P.T. Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute", and these "Spoofers"
are banking on that. Remember, your bank, your department store, your
credit card company or whoever will never email you asking you to verify
personal information.
Do Not Be A
Sucker! Learn how to recognize these fake emails and web sites who are
out to ruin your day, if not many many days! I am compiling a list of
things you can do to protect you from these dirty rotten scoundrels who
want to cause you grief.
Open an incognito web based email for
signing onto web sites that require you to "Sign Up" in order to receive
information about a product. Go to
http://www.yahoo.com and click on mail to sign up. DO NOT USE YOUR
REAL NAME! Make up somebody. Like "Maynard.G.Krebs" or other favorite TV
character. Remember to write this information down including passwords
and answers to secrete questions. Only use this email address when you
need to give one in order to get what you want from a web site. Many web
sites will in turn sell the email addresses they receive to spammers.
Don't let your regular, for real, email address fall into the hands of
spammers.
Is your email address through your
Internet Service Provider (I.S.P.)? That's perfectly fine. However, from
time to time our I.S.P. changes. Here at my house, Comcast was bought
out by Time Warner recently and all my I.S.P. based email addresses
changed. Bummer. I had to go and totally re-signup at many of my legit
Internet Member web sites. Get a web based email like gmail.com,
hotmail.com or yahoo.com. Not only will you always have the same email
address regardless of your I.S.P., you will also be able to access your
email from any Internet computer anywhere in the world.
Learn how to recognize a fake or spoof
email that looks like it came from Ebay or Paypal. Go to:
http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial to learn what you
should do if you receive an email like that.
Use a Virus Detection Software to protect
your computer. I like to use avast! and there is a free download to
personal, non-commercial, computer users. Avast! also detects something
called Spyware. Spyware is sometimes embedded into free software
downloads from unknown sources and searches your computer for personal
information. You can find avast! at:
http://www.avast.com .
