My Notes mail account doesn’t have Gmail’s heavy-duty spam/phishing protection built in, so I probably delete ten occurrences of specific worms/viruses (typically 31K attachments to various notes from nonexistent mail administrators)–which NAV catches as soon as I touch them anyway–every day, and maybe 20 phishing attempts, most “from” banks and services I’ve never used. (Cut off my Bank of the West online access? Feel free!)
There are also, of course, the ones that are a little more plausible–although I’ve noticed that bank-related ones seem to give up after a week or two. Then there’s Paypal, for which phishing attempts never seem to end. (Ebay as well–but there again, I don’t use it, so…)
Most are pretty obvious (spelling errors, lack of individual salutation, etc., etc). Some are grotesquely obvious–the page comes across as raw HTML. None gets by a simple “show source” check of the supposed links to Paypal (the action link, to be sure).
Lately, with the new version of Notes, it’s enough to just let the cursor hover over the supposed secure PayPal link; the real link shows up at the bottom of the screen.
Which brings me to this post: just received another phishing attempt, and the real link is at “www.clueless.net”
To which I can only respond, “Not quite that clueless.”
I have to keep reminding myself that those emails with a subject line about a “loan request” aren’t from librarians asking for an ILL.