Phishing sites/scams are designed to trick you into thinking you are at a legitimate website hoping that you will enter your login information, credit card information, or other personal information. It's difficult to detect these scams because they usually do a great job at impersonations. These phishing scams usually come in the form of an email. The email will look like it is from a legitimate source and saying something like the following:
[Subject: Paypal security department]
"Dear paypal user:
We have recently detected several attempts to log into your account from an unknown source. Please login to your Paypal account and confirm your security information."
The email will also include a company logo, as well as several other elements that a real Paypal email would look like.
The link that you think is supposed to log you into your account actually grabs your login information and stores it for the scammer to do whatever they want with.
How to determine if it's a scam / fake email:
Find the link they are trying to get you to click, without clicking on the link highlight over it, and look in the lower left hand corner of the email window. It should show a URL. If the URL does not begin with:
http://www.[domain].com
...where [domain] is the domain of company in which the email is about. So in this example, paypal is the domain - so the URL must begin with http://www.paypal.com. If it has anything else after the http://. IT IS A SCAM! Do not even click it.
Some email programs will not show the URL in the lower left of the window, so you can either take a chance and click the link, hoping that it's not linking to a virus script or play it safe and install antivirus software. Most popular antivirus programs have anti-phishing capabilities built in to detect these sites for you and warn you in advance. If you want to see who we recommend for antivirus software, check out our antivirus software review site.
Be careful when you receive any email that talks about your account or recent security issues. Also, these scams usually imitate large, popular sites such as Paypal, Ebay, some large banks, etc... If you ever fall for one of these scams, and someone gets ahold of your account information, you could have some major headaches down the road.
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