I recently received an email from a friend who rarely contacts me via email. The email had no subject and only contained a link inside:

https://projects.***********************prises.htm?nice.dual

Just days later, I received a second email from the same friend – another odd link:

https://208.***************************_Brown24/

A third email came again, just a few days later. The email was longer and had a subject, but was still pretty weird. It read:

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to alert you to a superb job opp in your area.
We have had several of our clients take this opp & I have heard lots of fantastic success stories.

The paper has story featuring one of our clients, Kelly R.. It will also give you all the relevant information you need to get started.
The link is https://mrfacil.******************************200&s= and I guess the story will be featured on the home-page until tomorrow.

bye!
Kind thanks,

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Spoofing is a common and annoying practice. A computer user – typically a hacker – accesses an account, pretends it’s his own, and proceeds to send spam or viruses to everyone in the hijacked person’s contact list.

Do you believe that my friend really sent those emails? Hopefully you have learned to easily dismiss fraudulent emails by paying attention to a few key elements:

Consider the source. My friend doesn’t email me very frequently, so three random emails from her in less than a couple of weeks is highly unusual. If you receive emails from someone that rarely emails you, think hard before you open the email or any links within. Is your contact emailing you out-of-the-blue, but for a specific purpose? Does the content of their email make sense? Then there’s probably no need to worry. Caution is wise when it comes to rare emails from contacts who don’t email often. Their rarely used email addresses may have been compromised and are no longer under their control. It may be weeks or even months before they notice since their email account isn’t well monitored.

Consider the source – the other source. Check either the address the email was sent from or if you can, the originating IP address.

Be obvious. Does it sound like someone you know wrote the email? Did they use your name? Their name? Is the email’s content something that seems likely they’d send to you?

For more advanced email users, recognizing spoofs may be a piece of cake. For others, though, it’s still tough to recognize spam, especially when it appears to come from someone they know. Keep a few cautions in mind when you’re checking your email and you’ll be harder to spoof.