Fake Emails: How to Identify Fake Email Addresses

[mdabuhasan]

Picture this: You open your inbox and see an urgent message from your bank. They claim your account has been compromised and that you need to verify your information immediately. Your heart races as you click the link, ready to protect your hard-earned money. But wait, have you fallen for one of the oldest scams of all time?

I've been researching this recently and I'm amazed at how sophisticated scam emails have become! Gone are the days when a typo or obvious Nigerian prince scam was easy to spot. These days, fake email addresses are almost indistinguishable from real ones.

So how do you detect a fake email address? There are several ways, but none of them are foolproof. You have albania phone number datato use a combination of techniques, and even then, you can't be 100% sure. But you can get pretty close. From dissecting email headers to understanding the psychology behind these phishing attacks, we'll walk you through everything you need to know to keep your inbox and your identity safe.

The Basics: Check the Sender's Email Address
To catch a scammer, you need to think like a scammer. Most scammers have a simple goal: to trick you into taking some action, whether it's clicking a link, downloading an attachment, or sharing your personal and financial information. But how do they get you to do that? The answer is a combination of psychological and technical means.

Let's start with the simplest technique: looking at the email address itself.

Identifying typosquatting
First, check the domain name of the email. If you are receiving an email from a well-known company, the domain name should match the company's official website. For example, an email from Amazon should come from @amazon.com, not @amaz0n.com.

Spammers use techniques such as typo squatting, where they register domain names that are very similar to legitimate domain names. For example, they might register gooogle.com (with three o's) and then use it to send phishing emails that look like they're from Google.

Subdomains: Don’t be fooled
Another common trick is to use subdomains to make the fake address look legitimate. For example, "paypal.secure-login.com" might look like it's from PayPal at first glance, but "secure-login.com" is the real domain. Always look at the root domain (the part before .com, .org, etc.) to determine the real sender.

Find Deceptive Display Names
Scammers can alter the display name in a phishing email to make it look like the email is from someone you know.

For example: an email may appear to be from "Amazon Customer Support", but the actual email address may be [email protected].

How to check: Hover or click on the display name to reveal the actual email address. This will usually reveal the true source of the email and can quickly show if it's legitimate.

Unicode Tips
This clever trick uses characters from non-Latin alphabets that look exactly like standard letters. For example, the Cyrillic letter "а" (U+0430) looks exactly like the Latin letter "a", but allows scammers to register different domain names.

To illustrate: Legitimate email address: apple.com Phishing scam email: аpple.com (notice the difference? There is no visual difference!).

If in doubt, you can copy and paste the address into a Unicode checker tool to check for any non-standard characters. It will display any non-standard characters.

Random characters in fake email addresses
Another thing to look out for in fake email addresses is random strings of numbers or letters. Real email addresses rarely have strings of characters like this, unless they are automatically generated for a specific purpose. If you see an email from [email protected], it's more likely to be fake than an email from [email protected].

But this isn't a hard and fast rule. Some people do use random numbers in their email addresses, especially if they have a common name and need to distinguish their address from others.

Reply Field
The next thing to check is the "Reply-To" address. This tells your email client where to send replies.