Phishing is sending an email falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to ‘scam’ a user into surrendering private information to be used for identity theft.

Phishing attempts to fraudulently acquire information such as passwords and credit card details for example by apearing to be a business such as a bank with whom a consumer may use services, it may visually look like an official electronic communication.

Consumers are directed to visit bogus websites and requested to update personal information, eg. passwords, credit card details or bank account numbers.

This type of fraud is not always easy to spot. Things to look out for are:

• Logos that are not an exact match to the company’s logo, spelling errors, random names or email addresses in the body of the text of the email, or email headers which have nothing to do with the company name mentioned in the email.

• Some companies always address customers with a specific username in the email, you may be sent an email that addresses you in a generic fashion