Keeping your email secure

Tip: Look at the email address of the sender not just the name

The above example shows an email from Sharon Mosley at the Westmount Day School. However upon closer inspection you can see her email address neither relates to Sharon or the school.

This is a common trick designed to trick you into thinking the email is from someone else.

Phishing emails typically use generic salutations such as “Dear valued member,” “Dear account holder,” “Dear customer,” or “Dear {Surname}”.

Phishing/scam emails often try to copy the format of official emails to trick you in believing they are genuine. It may be difficult at times to distinguish based on appearance alone if an email is fake. However you can do this by asking:

• Are they using their normal font/size or does this change throughout the email?
• Is it consistent with previous messages I’ve received from this person/company?

Tip: Look for grammatical mistakes, not spelling mistakes

In the above example, no individual word is spelt incorrectly, but the message is full of grammatical errors that a native speaker wouldn’t make, such as “We detected something unusual to use an application”.

Any supposedly official message that’s written this way is almost certainly a scam.

That’s not to say any email with a mistake in it is a scam. Everyone makes typos from time to time, especially when they’re in a hurry.

It’s therefore the recipient’s responsibility to look at the context of the error and determine whether it’s a clue to something more sinister. You can do this by asking:

• Is it a common sign of a typo (like hitting an adjacent key)?
• Is it a mistake a native speaker shouldn’t make (grammatical incoherence, words used in the wrong context)?
• Is this email a template, which should have been crafted and copy-edited?
• Is it consistent with previous messages I’ve received from this person?

If you weren’t expecting an attachment or email from the sender this may be a sign of scam/phishing email.

A good example of this would be an email informing you that you have won the lottery (I’m sure we have all had one), the only thing is you didn’t enter any lottery.

Tip: Check where links/buttons go before clicking on them

You can spot a suspicious link if the destination address doesn’t match the context of the rest of the email.

For example, if you receive an email from Netflix, you would expect the link to direct you towards an address that begins ‘netflix.com’.

Unfortunately, many legitimate and scam/phishing emails hide the destination address in a button, so it’s not immediately apparent where the link goes to.

In this example, you might click the link without giving it a second thought. You can check where links go before opening them by:

• On a computer, hover your mouse over the link, and the destination address appears in a small bar along the bottom of the browser or next to the mouse cursor.
• On a mobile device, hold down on the link and a pop-up will appear containing the link.

Often phishing/scam emails will cause stress and panic by introducing a sense of urgency often use phrases such as “Your account will be disabled,” “Security Breach,” “Needs prompt payment,” “Act now” or “Action Required.”