We all hear of lies and fake offers and tricks aimed at older people. First of all, those meanies need a good paddling. Most likely, they didn’t get it when they were growing up and needed it and now they are just punks.
“Phishing” involves email messages pretending to be from legitimate companies, trying to get account fractions, passwords, and other personal information.
Several years ago, my mama received numerous phone calls informing her that she had won a million dollars. The caller claimed to be from the national clearing house. She was informed that she needed to send a check for $499 for taxes and fees before her money could be sent. The other option was to send her bank routing number for an automatic withdrawal.
At one point, I was at her house and answered the phone. I informed the caller that they we would happily meet them with a check in the Kroger parking lot and that we would bring the police along just to insure validity. We never received another call.
We were all a little disappointed in one, that she didn’t truly win a million dollars, and two, that they did not agree to meet us. We really were hoping for a showdown.
Mama was very upset about the whole thing. She was (and still is) smart enough to not give any personal information but it certainly unnerved her. She became afraid to leave her house, thinking someone was watching her and would make their way inside while she was away. It began a flurry of fear issues that lasted a long time.
The word phishing is a neologism created as a homophone of fishing due to the similarity of using a bait in an attempt to catch a victim. According to the Microsoft Computing Safety Index published in 2014, the annual worldwide impact of phishing could be as high as $5 billion. That is a whole lot of phishing.
Another type of this debauchery is called evil twins, a phishing technique that is hard to detect. A phisher creates a fake wireless network that looks similar to a legitimate public network found in places like airports, hotels, or coffee shops. When someone logs on to the bogus network, fraudsters try to capture their passwords and/or credit information.
Lastly, a phishing attack that is directed specifically at senior executives and other high-profile targets, is called whaling. The content of a whaling attack is often written as a legal subpoena, customer complaint, or executive issue.
I wish that people could keep with real fishing. It is so much fun to pull in a big, fat walleye and grill it up for dinner. It may not make you billions, but the feeling is indeed priceless.