Four Tips on Avoiding Online Scams

The internet can be a scary place. Spammers may attempt to get money out of you using fraudulent online marketing ploys.

Internet scams are on the rise. These scams come from every corner of the globe. There’s so many emails and hacked websites revolving around phishing schemes and general scams that in boxes are simply inundated with them.

With the lack of quality that some of the more common scams have, you would think that there wouldn’t be a soul in the world that would fall for them.

From everything to cheaply designed imitation websites to poor grammar, there are red flags that anyone should be able to see. Below are four tips to avoid Internet scams that everybody should know about already.

4. Don’t Give Anyone Your Money

If someone were to walk up to you on the street and ask you the following, what would you do? “Hello Sir or Madam! It is a very fine day. I would like for you to deposit $200,000.00 into my bank account to receive $5 Million USD.”

You would probably laugh in their face, right? Then why in the world would anyone ever give some stranger requesting money on the Internet what they want? Your money should be reserved for things that you want. Don’t ever give it to someone else just because they promise more money in return.

3. Don’t Trust Anyone

Would your bank ever send you an email from an address like “[email protected]”? The short answer is that they wouldn’t. They have official email address that they used for customer service. To keep yourself safe from Internet scams, just don’t trust anyone that looks suspicious. It’s actually a relief if you end up contacting your bank to verify whether the email is actually from them, because it means less work for them in the event that the email isn’t from them.

2. Don’t Click on Links

It doesn’t matter if you have a dial-up connection, you’re risking just as much by clicking on links that you aren’t familiar with in your email. When you hover over a link in your email, you can see the address. Why would your bank use an email address like “http://thisisyourbank.com.not.a.real.website.fr/”?

Again, the simple answer is that they wouldn’t. To protect yourself from Internet scams, just don’t click on those links if they don’t look trustworthy.

1. Recognize Spam

Corporations spend thousands of dollars a year employing people who can spell. All it takes is one little typo to make a business the laughing-stock of an industry. With that being said, do you really think that they would send out an email to you in broken English? If anything looks wrong in an email, just don’t trust it. Chances are that the presence of multiple grammatical errors and misspellings located in an email means that the sender isn’t who they say they are.