Go phish

Fed up with phishing emails looking to harvest personal information or logon information to financial sites from you? You can report these mails to the US department of homeland security who are collecting all this information to help combat the practice.

I'm not sure how much they'll actually be able to do but an awful lot of people fall prey to these scams every year, so I say it's worth a try.

If in any doubt as to whether a mail phishing for information there are a couple of rules to follow:

1. Never enter any information into a form within a mail and hit submit. Real organisations do not ask you to logon in that way.

2. If you think it might be real don't click on the link in the mail but go to the home page of the site and logon as normal. If you need to do something then there will be instructions there on how to do it.

The same goes for phone calls - never give out personal info. My bank obviously forgot about this rule when they rang me up a little while back:

THEM : Hello, Mr. _, this is _ bank here, we'd just like to inform you about some changes to your account.

ME : OK.

THEM : If we could just confirm your identity please.

ME : No.

THEM : Erm, what do you mean?

ME : Well, you've just rung me out of the blue. No offense but you could be anybody at all. I should be asking you to confirm your identity first.

THEM : But I'm calling from the bank.

ME : So you say. And I'm me.

THEM : But we need to confirm that.

ME : Well I don't plan on giving you any personal information over the phone.

THEM : But then we can't tell you about your account.

ME : It would seem so. Perhaps you should think about a more sensible method of doing it next time. A letter would surely suffice.

THEM : [slightly huffy now] Yes, well, I won't bother you any more. Goodbye.

ME : Goodbye.

I'm still not really sure if it really was a customer care person from the bank or not, but if there was anything they needed to inform me about I'm sure I'll get a letter about it at some point. I certainly wasn't giving out my mother's maiden name, my telephone banking password and the name of my first pet (which I had to make up as I've never had a pet).