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How do we know its a email scam when we see one?
Most of the time, we can sense its a scam just by the content of the email. However, in some rare cases (or when we are tired) we might be temporarily “stunned” by certain emails, an example for me is the google phishing email posted several days ago.
As a rule of thumb, if you are asked to part with money due to an unsolicited email bearing a free email address (e.g. gmail, yahoo mails, etc), you can be quite certain this is a scam. This is the same thing with love scam (aka dating scam). When your lover – a stranger you have not met – in a foreign country suddenly came up with an excuse to ask for your money, its very likely to be a scam. Even if in some rare cases it isn’t, you shall not be blamed for ignoring the pleas.
In another case, we tend to receive email from whom we thought is an authoritative email address. However, such emails will definitely include the actual email address of the scammer, mostingly using some free domain names, or a domain name from a recently registered site. The emails can either be included in the content of the email, and if not, it will be in the mail header under “reply-to”.
See the picture below, a scam mail faking this domain gcsl.com (parking domain). The reply will be redirected to a btinternet.com email address. What is btinternet.com? Its Yahoo.
It happens to us, someone used our email address to send out scam mails. We considered this a stupid act because the receiver would not believe in any email bearing the word “hotscams” in them. If the scammers are just trying to irritate us, then it had failed horribly. If they aren’t, then they are plain stupid for spoofing our email address bearing “hotscams”.
