Educate yourself against SPAM-based fraudulent emails

Temporary email addresses can do a lot to protect your online privacy and your personal email address from SPAM.  But you must be careful with fraudulent SPAM emails even if they are sent to your temporary email address.

The best offense against SPAM-based fraud is a good "educate yourself" defense.  When you're able to see telling signs that an email seems phishy (or fishy!), you're much more likely to not be moded or put in a harmful position.

Here's some classic examples of fraudulent SPAM emails.  If you see these or any variants, be extremely careful when clicking on links or responding.

1) Phishing for your personal information
BEWARE if someone emails you from a credit card company, government agency or reputable company and asks you to provide or verify your personal information.  This include passwords or logins to sites you use.

The best thing to do in this case is to go to Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo and search for the company/agency in question.  Call the phone number that's listed on their official site for clarification.

Do not respond to the email, call a number listed in the email or contact them through any link on the email.  These can all be cleverly designed tricks into making you think you're contacting them when in reality, you're calling the scammer.

2) Winning a lottery
BEWARE if someone emails you saying you won any type of lottery or inheritance.  Do not pay and "fees" or "taxes" as these are one-way tickets to losing money and not being able to ever recover it.

If they ask for your bank account numbers, check numbers, check copies or wire instructions - avoid and ignore!

3) Buying products and services
BEWARE of purchasing products through emails.  You may see deals that are to good to be true.  In these cases, it's likely that the product is a knock-off or made of toxic products that have not been approved for human usage.

The purchasing of these products can also be used as a gateway to identity theft which is a real issue and can also occur from interacting with email frauds.

It's important to note that many of these scams originate from outside your country.  Even with the help of your law enforcement, it may be extremely difficult if not impossible to track down and recover any money lost.

Using a temporary email does help protect your online privacy, but they are not 100% perfect.  It's still very important to stay educated and watchful with your email dealings.

You can learn more about SPAM and unsolicited emails at the Texas Attorney General's website.

Be safe out there.