There is a rash on spam lately, and hence a rash of calls from friends looking to clean their computers, that LOOK like it is from Amazon, UPS, FEDX, ETC that entice you to over react to the email in an attempt to hack your passwords. In the below image, you can see it proposing shows someone has just bought a $989 watch. The initial reaction is supposed to be "Oh Dammit - I need to cancel that ASAP." So you click the link without thinking and dutifully enter your user name and password.

However, if the user took a second to mouse over the actual link, they would see it wasn't a https://amazon.com address at all, but in this case a PHP on some .org site n the UK. (Crossed off so no one would have the urge to type it.)

The course of action to take if something like this gets through your spam filters and you is to physically type the address of the site you want to go to in the browser, then check from the account level. Or, better yet, get a password manager like ROBOFORM (https://majorgeeks.com/AI_RoboForm_d2428.html) .

Roboform stores your passwords and detects if you are at a site with a stored password - then offers to fill in the password for you. If you accidentally clicked a link as in this scenario, it would not offer to fill in the password and hence start flying the red flags.


Hopefully, this will save some of you some hassle and us some phone calls from panicked friends.

Surf safe folks.