Now I KNOW I said the internet was relatively safe, and I meant it. The internet is a marvelous tool that can be used to glean information, wonderful new purchases and a lot more. If you use it correctly and take a few precautions.

It honestly isn’t that much different than the real world. I know that when you go home at night you probably lock the door and you don’t invite the drug dealer from the corner to sleep in the spare room just before you lock the door do you?

Most of us can answer yes to that question.

The same thing holds true of the internet, email and every other method that people might use to take advantage of you, swindle you or otherwise take your money.
The tactics that phishing uses to gather your information and use it to hold your money hostage, or worse yet… spend it are not far different than the merry widower might use to get a little old lady’s bank account. They are online and in the real world. Online however, is a bit more deceptive and a bit less easily spotted.because using electronic means makes it easier to grab your bank information by tricking you.

The truth is that even if you’ve never ever ever stepped foot into cyberspace, chances are quite good that using one of the “find anyone for a buck “services, people can tell you your name, address, phone number and quite possibly your bank and dry cleaners.

They can check what you read at the library and who your parents are.. and in fact, its all quite legal.

USE COMMON SENSE…. It sounds redundant as hell, but the truth is that it will go a long way toward keeping you  and your assets safe.

Tomorrow morning you wake up and check your brand new email and see an email telling you that your paypal account is in jeopardy of being closed because you need to click the link, log into your account and do some update or another. Or that your bank account is overdrawn and if you don’t log in immediately and explain it all, or click some link and check it out, that your account will be closed.

If you’re getting accustomed to the internet, in most cases you will simply hit the delete button, use a few colorful metaphors and move on to the next mail, but sometimes…

If you’re a new user, and amazingly, even if you’re not, in some cases, people will get you with that “you have to do it by ten AM or your account will be closed.

Now there’s nothing wrong with believing it, or being cautious enough to want to log into your account and check it out. It’s common to be a bit on the nervous side about an email like that, but don’t let it make you silly.

Never Never NEVER..    we’ll add one more NEVER, click a link in an email having anything to do with your finances or personal information.

It isn’t necessary. If you question whether it MIGHT be true, leave that link alone.

Open up your browser yourself, manually and type the address of your banks web site into it.

As a general rule, what you’re going to get hit with when you click the email link is that it takes you to a phishing site, where some wonderfully accurate keystroke logging software (a software that “sees” every key you hit and records its. That means your login information) that quickly  gathers up your information and logs in to your bank account and makes your money fly away to pay for someone else’s trip to Jamaica.

Don’t type in the address in the email. Instead, if you don’t know it by heart, go to google and type in the name of your bank in the search engine. Thats a link you can safely click.

Trying to sort it all out makes for a lousy day.

LIkewise, don’t pass along information about your web host, your service provider or anything else that you aren’t absolutely certain that you can trust the person you are giving it to with.

Frankly I’ve got friends I met online who have my web site host information and family members who DON’T.

Not everyone on the internet is a crook, but not everyone is nice either. If you have the slightest doubt in your mind, keep your information to yourself.

In the case of your bank, no one needs to know that but you.

Guard your information, don’t spread it around, don’t discuss it on messengers, don’t pass it out and don’t click those links.