How to Spot a Spoof Part II - Using the Monster Logo as an example

This series started with:
“How to Spot a Spoof Part I - The Series begins with the new Monster Spoof�

I promised to use the Monster spoof as an example, and give you more tools that can be used to identify a possible spam or spoof.

The right logo does NOT mean the e-mail is legit. It’s easy to copy images, photos, and logos off of a web page and paste them to a file for personal use. It’s illegal in some cases, but done fairly regularly. Since I’m an artist who expects people to pay for my photography legally and respectfully, I won’t go into How to pull a photo or logo off a page - it’s not our focus anyway, sooo...

Real e-mail communication from a business would have the company logo, so if it is not there, it is likely a spoof. But having a logo is not automatically safe.

Next, you want to look at the click through web address. It may just be one letter off of the real one, in very tricky places. For example it might be https:// when the real address is http:// (No s) so it looks deceptively like the website you always go to. Or it may have an extra word in there that is not in the real address. For example it might be www.monster.jobs.com Or the e-mail says it came from . (I changed it a bit, don’t go there!!!) But “site� should not be in there. Sounds pretty good, huh? Ay no! Don’t go by How it sounds or looks. Investigate!

So, this e-mail from the SUPPOSED Monster.com has a beautiful logo at the top. And it offers an enticing, EASY money making job:

JOB DESCRIPTION
Agent's work consists in receiving payment from customers (Wells Fargo bank transfer or direct deposit) and making further payments to our main office or to one of our regional affiliate departments, depending on the customer's location. Being a part-time job, it should not take more than 2 hours per day. Agent's commission is 6% from each transaction

So I go to the real Monster ON MY OWN. I don’t have it in my Favorites, so I google it and find the address to be www.Monster.com. I log into my account, go through their impossibly cluttered page to try to find where jobs would be listed. Enter that area, and they have one job listed for me - surprise, surprise - in graphic design, the area I signed up for. There is no SafeMed offering me an easy job in transferring money.

Today we learned:
The company logo is important but not a sure thing for safety.
Just because it looks or sounds like the right site address, doesn’t mean it is.
A change in one letter, or adding a word, can be the deception they use.
Check it out yourself

There is more to learn, so stay tuned for How to Spot a Spoof Part III: e-mail accounts and accuracy

Also see the previous article at http://bloggerparty.com/how_to_spot_a_spoof_part_i_monsters