I got an interesting e-mail. It was from "Bank of America." It looked authentic. However, my scamdar sounded an warning.



Yes,I have credit card accounts at Bank of America (but only because B of A swallowed up my previous banks). However, the warning in the email was about a check card. I don't have a cash account at BofA, and therefore have no "check card."

I looked at the links embedded in the email. The idea was to get me to click on a link. Clicking on that link would open up a browser (for example, IE or FireFox) and then open up a website.

Would the web site be legitimate? Not likely.

By hovering my mouse over a link, the real destination for the link displayed in the lower-left-hand corner of the e-mail window. By the way, that feature is in the e-mail program Thunderbird. If you're not using Thunderbird, it might not work the same.



Another way to see the real link:

1. highlight the link (carefully drag mouse across the link)
2. copy it (Menu --> Edit --> Copy),
3. paste it into the address bar of the web browser (IE, FireFox,etc)

Just to be sure,

1. I used FireFox to go to the real BofA website
2. logged in as myself
3. clicked on the "Alerts" link.

Guess what ... Bank of America sent no such e-mail.

I missed a real adventure. Had I blindly followed the email's instructions, many wonderful things could have happened.

• the website could place a Trojan Horse on my computer
• the Trojan could capture all of my keystrokes, thereby making available to the scammers all of my accounts and passwords
• the site could have planted a virus on my computer, wreaking all sorts of havoc
• and a lot more .....
  

There's a lesson in there somewhere.