An online scam that almost had me fooled – here’s a tip to protect you

A while back I wrote you about how a number of people had their Apple iTunes account broken into, and I mentioned how this most likely happened due to “phishing scams”.

Phishing scams, of course, are scams where a criminal tries to trick you into entering personal information ranging from username and passwords, to credit card numbers or other information that can be used for identity theft.

Knowledge is the most powerful tool you can use to stay safe. In this email I’ll teach you something about web site addresses which will help protect you against phishing scams and similar threats.  URLs (short for “Uniform Resource Locator” or basically, a website address) can be broken down into smaller parts which can help you understand how they work, which can help you stay safer online.

I recently opened an email which at first glance looked like it came from Amazon.com and was an order confirmation. It looked very official and for a half second, I was totally fooled, despite being very knowledgeable about these things.

[Update: I've added a new post to the blog where I show you the email and go over in plain English exactly how to was able to recognize the scam email - use the link to watch the video]

Now there were a number of things in the email which made me realize it was a scam, but the big tip-off  was that the links in the email didn’t actually point to Amazon.com, although I’m sure if I’d clicked them I would have been taken to a website designed to *look* like Amazon.

Understanding how website addresses work will help you avoid falling for that trick, and it can help make your life easier in general.
Let’s start with the term domain name. We’re not just going to talk about domain names themselves, but also “top level domain names” (TLDs) and “subdomains”.

Not everyone understands what a domain name is, exactly, and some people think they do, but actually misunderstand exactly what it is.  That’s OK — keep reading to make sense  of the computer term, and others related to it.

Phishing scams usually can only fool people if the person doesn’t understand how to read and break down the address of a website into it’s individual parts.  The scammers will make a website address that looks official if you don’t read it carefully or if you don’t understand how the addresses work.

If you can’t read the address properly and can’t tell a real address from a fake one, then you can get into real trouble.

Let’s take a look at the parts that make up a website address so you understand it better. We’ll use a real & legitimate website address as an example.

When you’re looking at a website address, it typically has a format something like the following (note – the example is not a link)

www.worthgodwin.com/computer-training-cds/

You’ll notice is has a few sections to the address, so let’s break it down into parts, using the above address as an example.

www — this is the “subdomain” and despite popular belief, it is optional, and also does not have to be “www”. “www” is by far the most common subdomain, but pretty much anything could be a subdomain, or you can even leave it off in most cases.
But the bottom line is you can set it to anything you want, including something potentially deceptive.

worthgodwin — in the above example, this is the actual domain name. Typically the domain name is the name of the business or organization that runs the site, or it is descriptive of what the site is about.

This has to be purchased, and has to be unique, so you can’t use someone else’s domain without their permission.

.COM — this is the “TLD” or top level domain name. .com is by far the most common, but there are many others. The TLD is supposed to give the visitor an idea what broad category the site should fit into.

.Com means commercial, (although many non-commercial sites use it) .org is some kind of organization like a non-profit organization, etc.

Each country has it’s own TLD, too, like .US for the United States, .UK for the United Kingdom, .IN for India, etc.

Many of the TLDs are pretty casual — i.e. you can use whatever you want, even if it’s not an exact match for your type of site.

But some of them are very carefully restricted, such as .GOV for US government, .MIL for military, .EDU for actual schools or universities, etc.

/computer-training-cds/ — the last part of the address above refers to a folder, just like a folder on your computer. This is normally used to indicate a specific section of the site, and in this case is the main page with information about my computer training CDs.

If you are setting up your own site, keeping it organized like this can help Google figure out what your site is about, and help you get the visitors you want.

So now that you have a better understanding of the individual parts of a web address, how does this relate to protecting against phishing scams?

Well, first off, anytime you see a link in an email, you can put your mouse pointer over it and see where the link will take you.  If the link doesn’t match the supposed sender, that’s a dead giveaway.

So if the email is supposed to be from Amazon.com, but the link actually points to someplace completely different, do not click on the link!

But some scammers get a little more clever with it and will make the link point to something like:

amazon.fakesite.com

See what they did there?

If you look at that with understanding of website addresses, you’ll see the fake address has Amazon in the address, but it’s the *subdomain* not the domain name!

That should clearly tell you that the site is NOT Amazon.com, but someone who doesn’t understand the difference could fall for that trick very easily.

And that’s the tip I wanted to share with you to help keep you safe.

One last thing — I mentioned you can put your mouse pointer over a link and leave it there for a moment to see where the link will take you.

On most email programs and web browsers, the link address will show up on the very bottom of the window in something called the “status bar”. If you don’t see the status bar at the bottom of your email window, look in the “View” menu and you should see an option to show or hide the status bar.  The exact location of this menu option varies from one program to the next, but it’s generally found in the View menu somewhere.

The one big exception to this is newer versions of the Mac OS X Mail program did away with the status bar and instead the address will show up in a “tool tip” which is like a little word bubble which appears after a second or two when you put your mouse pointer over the link.

Why not test this tip out with the links below.  The links take you to my website to a page where you can find out more about my easy video lesson CD course on Safe and Easy Email — included in the lessons is a lot more info on protecting yourself online (including video lessons showing you more like what I talked about in this article), plus simple basics of how to use email and more.

Here are the links to try out:

If you have a PC running any version of Windows:

Microsoft Windows How to Use Email Safely

If you have an Apple Mac computer running OS X:

Apple Mac How to Use Email Safely

When you put your pointer over either link you’ll see it points directly to my website and so is safe to click.

I hope that helps, and that you stay safe and have a great day.

Until next time, take care, and enjoy,

Worth Godwin
Plain English Simplicity For This Complex Modern World

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.