What is Phishing?

Phishing is the 21st Century’s version of the con-man. A renowned circus guy once said: “there’s a sucker born every minute” These scam artists pose as someone you might trust (a big brand name or worse yet, a bank), purely for evil means. Typically they send email under the guise of a household name like Amazon, EBay, PayPal or Citibank and use fear tactics to get you to divulge your username and password. Once they have this, they can use this information to fraudulent bilk your account.

One of the oldest phishing scams on the internet was named by the US State Department as “419 scams” – the old Nigerian prince that died and would give you $10M if you would just give him your bank account information and $2000 to bribe the right authorities.