Reporting Phishing Effectively
November 14th, 2007 | by admin |When reporting phishing, you will need to provide certain pieces of information. Without these items, your efforts will be almost useless. Depending on the type of contact, you will need to use different methods to gain the necessary information.
As an example, when reporting phishing contacts that show up on your instant messenger, you may have a difficult time locating where the other person or computer is actually transmitting from. The best thing you can do with these is see if you can get the individual to send an email to a disposable email address. If the message was not sent by an individual, you can still try reporting phishing to the host for your instant messenger service. They may be able to look up the screen name associate with the phishingmessage, and take the necessary steps to ensure the person behind the messages is apprehended.
In many cases, contemporary phishers rely on email to convey their canvassing letters. When reporting phishing of this type, you will need to be able to access information about the path the computer took from the phisher’s computer to yours. This information includes the IP address, webhost, and certain validation stamps. For the most part, you do not see this information when you receive an email. Each server and email service has different instructions for making “full headers” visible. If you need help with this, you may want to review the help instructions, or other resources made available with your email account. Unfortunately, when reporting phishing, you will not be in a position to know if this header information was designed to prevent law enforcement authorities from tracking where it came from.
On the other hand, reporting phishing to the bank or financial institution being impersonated is very important, even if the header information is misleading. When banks receive this information from you, they will become aware that this type of letter is circulating. This, in turn, may help them employ additional systems to make sure that would be thieves get caught before they actually rob someone’s account.
Along with reporting phishing to the bank or credit card lender, you will also need to report phishingto law enforcement authorities. You may want to send copies of emails and correspondences to the FBI. The FCC also has a unit dedicated to stopping identity theft. Since phishing spams are an attempt to steal your identity, either agency may be able to make additional suggestions about how to protect yourself from phishing.
In order to be successful at reporting phishing, you will need to make sure you have some basic information about the sender. If you are contacted via an instant messenger service, you may only be able to report it to the instant messaging host, and the bank being impersonated. While emails can offer more information about a scammer, the information can still be manipulated to prevent capture of the sender. Irregardless of this, reporting phishing to the authorities as well as the financial institution being impersonated is very important.
