Email scams: how to spot to them and what to do

Email scams are everywhere.  It's only a matter of time before you receive one in your inbox.  If you're not vigilant, you could find yourself falling victim.  One wrong click is all it takes.

So what do you need to stay aware of in order to recognize an email scam when you see one?

1. Sense of urgency - if an email is telling you to act now, within the next 24 hours, before 5pm today, etc, you want to be careful.  If it's not from a trusted source, don't do anything!
2. Account in trouble - these notifications usually appear to come from a credit card company, a bank, or Paypal.  Don't click on anything, and don't call any phone numbers listed in the email itself.  Instead, take out the credit card or debit card from your wallet and call the number listed on the back.  In the case of Paypal, visit www.paypal.com to find their legitimate contact information.
3. Embedded link in an unexpected email.  Obviously, there are many legitimate embedded links in emails.  What I'm talking about here are the ones that come from unexpected sources.  ESPECIALLY the ones that are forwarded to you from friends an family members.  All those lovely Power Point presentations set to music with poetic sayings are NOT safe.  Most of these are created by the bad guys online who like to install malware and viruses on your computer.
4. Too good to be true - No, Mark Zuckerberg is not donating $1 million dollars if a certain post reaches 10,000,000 likes.  No, AOL is not going to give you your portion of $10 million dollars if you forward an email to everyone you know.  No, there is no prince in Zambia waiting to give you all his money for no good reason.  DELETE these emails!!!!
5. Generic greeting - those of us in marketing know how to personalize the emails we send.  We know how important a personal relationship with our prospects and customers are.  So we are not going to send anything that says "Dear Valued Customer."  We value you too much!  These kinds of greetings are usually an indicator that the email is spam.  

If you receive an email that you suspect is spam, report it as such! Once reported, delete it immediately.  And if anyone forwards you an email that you suspect is spam, please respond to them and let them know you don't want these emails any longer.  You might also want to turn them onto Snopes.com .  This site is the top site for investigating email and internet scams.  If you have doubts, look it up on Snopes before taking action.