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What are Phony Websites ?
Ever since the Paypal article went live we have had a lot of people asking us about phony websites.
So what exactly is a phony website? It is a website that has been set up to look like another well know website. Usually a bank or in the case of the link above Paypal. Basically a phony website is designed to fool you into thinking that you are at a site you know well. Then they usually steal your banking username and password and then steal your money.
Typically you get a piece of email that looks legitimate telling you that you have to go and login urgently . They then put a link in the email to their phony website . The link usually looks like your banks web address, however hidden from you is the phony website address.
There are a couple of things you can do to protect yourself. Firstly if you do get an email from your bank telling you to login ring your bank! Ask them if the email is legitimate. If it is, change banks - because they do not know the first thing about online security. A good bank (there's an oxymoron for you) will not send such an email.
Next look for clues in the email itself, is the spelling bad? Does it have bad grammar? A lot of these thieves do not have english as a first language so quite often they make errors.
You can go to the phony website but I would not recommend it unless you have a good firewall and popup stopper and you have Firefox as your browser. Have a look at the article I wrote on pop ups to make sure you have all the right protections.
Typically the phony website will look exactly like the real thing. Usually however the links don't take you anywhere and they just try to get your password and user name. Also have a look at the address in the location bar of your browser. You will notice that it is not the same as your banks web address. We run a free Email Hoax Alert! service which you are more than welcome to subscribe to.
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Phony Websites 
