“They got me!” exclaimed one of our colleagues, earlier this week. In an angry confession, he admitted that upon receiving a text message from who he believed to be his main banking institution, he clicked on a link to discover whether or not fraud had occurred on his account.
“The message said something about detecting fraud on my account and asked me to log in,” he explained, “After logging in, I realized I probably shouldn’t have done that. So I logged out and called my bank right away. The guy on the phone told me they never send out such text messages and that it was a fraudulent message from someone trying to scam me. I had to replace my bank card and change my password. It was so frustrating.”
Spam comes in all forms.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of scammers out there and they try to get your money in one way or another. Now, this isn’t to say that all of your unwanted messages of solicitation – otherwise known as “spam” – are from fraudsters. However, it doesn’t make it any more pleasant to receive spam. So how do you put a stop to it?
One way is to do the opposite of what our associate did. Do not click on any links sent to you from an unknown source. That includes text messages and emails. As Glenn Fleishman explains on MacWorld.com, phishing relies on fooling you about messages, so it’s important to never click on any URLs sent to you in unsolicited emails.
“I’ve taken to rarely clicking on a link, but instead visiting a site if I need to know something, unless I can absolutely be confident the URL looks exactly like what I expect,” he informs.
Don’t just click “delete”.
In our last blog about spam, we pointed out that hitting the “unsubscribe” button may not be as effective as you think. Many experts believe that clicking on “unsubscribe” only informs the email’s sender that your email address is valid.
Some people don’t even get as far as the “unsubscribe” link because they just delete their spam messages without opening them. And while this practice may help to ward off some spammers, it may not necessarily decrease the amount of spam you get. It’s important to mark spam as spam.
“When an unsolicited email makes an appearance in your inbox, never just delete it,” advises Jessica Greene on Zapier.com, “Always mark it as spam. This is how the automatic spam filters learn to identify spam and filter it out.”
Is there really a way to stop spam in its tracks?
If you ask us, all the preventative measures, as described above, can really do is slow spam down – maybe. In fact, in our experience, there really is no stopping spam without legitimate protection against it.
At MeloTel, we’re proud to offer MeloTel Spam Portal which has been proven to block 99.9 percent of all spam. With the help of two antivirus products – Kaspersky and Clam AV – MeloTel Spam Portal successfully identifies and blocks phishing mail, mail from Botnets, graphic based spam, malicious URLs and more!
For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us at 1-888-MELOTEL or use the Live Chat feature on our website!