If
You Have Fallen Victim to Phishing - What To Do
Even the most
net-savvy person can fall victim to a phishing scam. All it takes is a
single moment of weakness when you aren't thinking clearly, and the damage
is done.
The first thing
you need to do is to report it. You want to report at to the company or
banking institution that you may have fallen victim to phishing and your
account may be compromised.
Because many of
the phishing scams require you to enter in your credit card information,
if you have done so, you also need to contact your credit card provider
and give them the details about the possibility your account has been
compromised.
You should also
contact the company that was in the forged email. Both PayPal and eBay,
who are frequent targets of phishing scammers, even have special e-mails
set up just for forwarding these kinds to.
Change all your
passwords immediately. If you act fast enough, you can beat the scammer.
And even if you aren't sure you have acted fast enough to prevent your
information from being compromised, you should still change your password
anyway. And don't forget, a good password should be a least eight characters
long and be a combination of numbers as well as both upper and lowercase
letters.
Always review
credit card and bank statements to check that there are no discrepancies.
The faster you were able to catch these, the better.
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