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The most obvious email scams tend to come in two varieties: the phishing email where the sender poses as a bank, government or other financial institution and provides a link to a form for the victim to provide information while the other type is the scam email letter usually originating from a foreign country such as Nigeria, UK, Cote D'Ivore or other country in Europe or Africa. Typically, the phishing email will be addressed from Paypal, a credit union, bank, the IRS or credit card company. The subject field in the email will often have the words: message, alert or notice. Some of the phrases used might be "Account Suspended", "Please contact us", "Security Update", or "Verify your account information." They tend to be shorter than the scam emails from Nigeria. With the Nigerian emails, there is usually a person's name either real, stolen or ficticious. In the From: field header, email addresses and company names or official sounding names may also appear. When a bank's name is used it can appear similar to phishing. Both the from field and the subject field sometimes contain bold letters. In the subject field, the following words may be used: dear, friend, urgent, greetings or from, just to name a few. Some of the phrases used include: "Dear Beloved in Christ", "International Promotion" or "Award Winning Notification." |