Spammers have gotten more and more sophisticated in recent years. Long gone are the offers of millions if you simply help some poor Nigerian refugee. Now you can get official-looking emails that, if you don’t think before you click, can take you to all sorts of unscrupulous places. One example of this convincing type of spam came this afternoon.At first the email looked like a new and unusual approach from Amazon. It looked convincing enough. The logo said Amazon.com Gift Card and it wasn’t for a ridiculously huge amount. Add in the fact that I AM a very good Amazon customer, and it would not totally absurd for them to send a small token of thanks. After all, they regularly offer me all kinds of free app downloads and music deals.
So how did I know this was a load of crap spam email and not something real? Simple. First, I’ve NEVER known Amazon to do such a promotion. Second, it came to my Gear Diary email address. Thing is, my Amazon account is linked to a DIFFERENT account. There is no way Amazon would know of my dan@geardiary.com address. Third thing is, the claim code in this email is not the format Amazon actually uses. That was enough for my to right-click the link so I would see whiter it came from. Sure enough, this was a spam email and not from Amazon at all. Unfortunately, if I had not been thinking I could easily have clicked through, and I have no idea where the link would have taken me.
In short, when you are on the net it is worth slowing down and thinking before you click any link you get. As the saying goes, better safe than sorry, and that thoughtful email you just got just might be spam … or worse!